My First Million: The Startup Sins Of Uber, Why Scaling Is Overrated, and More

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.

If you have $10 million at a jawline, guess who's all in?

Sam is all in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Definitely all in.

So, like, I love this guy.

I feel like I can rule the world.

I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days off on a road less travel

never looking back.

I have a feeling you're coming with fire or something.

You seem fiery today.

I got some good stuff.

I saw this ad on Instagram and this is the most amazing marketing funnel I've ever seen.

Maybe ever, but definitely for a musician.

So check this out.

Stop scrolling.

You have 24 hours.

We're Carol Unka, an independent hip hop group.

Last year we had the honor of being placed on Brock Hampton's official community playlist

and we were also shouted out by Kenny Beats.

You're a lot to go off.

I bet you can do it.

This year, we're trying to grow our fan base.

So for the first 15 people who DM us on Instagram in the next 24 hours, we're going to send

you a special gift.

Swipe up the DM us now.

So the beginning of the audio didn't play there, but he goes, do you recognize these

people?

And it's like Biggie Pock, whoever, like just like a bunch of famous rappers, it goes, stop

scrolling.

And then he basically does this little thing.

So I was like, so Ben leave you, Ben sent this to me and I was like, what is this amazing

this?

Let me, I must swipe up.

I must know what this free gift is.

So I do it.

What does that lead you to?

It opens up Facebook Messenger with a direct message already ready for their, like for

their team.

And it just says, send it automatically sends them a message from you saying, send me the

free gift.

Okay.

So that happens.

And then they, they respond, yo, what's good immediately.

Right.

So you're like, okay, I don't know what's happening here, but I'm intrigued.

The next thing that happens, I have screenshots of this stuff below your, below some of your

research.

So they go, yo, Sean, what's good?

So they use my name and the thing, they pull it from Facebook Messenger.

And then it says, give us a little bit, we'll get back to you ASAP with your gift and some

more details.

Thanks for your patience.

Okay.

Cool.

One day later, I get a message.

It's an audio note from the guys who are the, the, the rap group.

And it's basically like introducing themselves and, and again, this is kind of mass produced,

but it works.

They go, yo, Sean.

And then it's the audio, which is like, yo, here's our story where these guys, blah,

blah, blah, here's what we're doing.

And then they said, you know, for your gift, we wrote you your own custom song.

We personalized the lyrics just for you.

And so, you know, let me know what you think.

It links to us.

It links to their SoundCloud.

And it says, Sean, king of the first million.

That's the name of the song.

So then.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this is the song.

And I'm like, okay, I don't know what's happening right now, but like this has never happened

before, where you go from, there's an Instagram and Instagram ad about a band that you never

heard of.

Then you swipe up, then they send you an audio note and a personal message, then they send

you a song the following day, that's like got your name in it.

And then they follow it up again, and they're like, yo, I don't know if you're into those

New York, I'm gonna pretend you are, we're doing a show.

Here's the link to a show.

Here's the tickets.

And then they send like this automated graphic

using Canva of, you can see it there.

It's like me crowd surfing.

It's like, I don't know what is going on,

but this band is kind of genius

in the way that they're promoting themselves.

And they're still small.

They're called Kara Lanka.

They're still small.

But when I saw this, I was like,

they may or may not be the best musician,

but they're probably have the highest overlap of market,

like kind of marketing genius for a young band

and they play music, right?

It's like, there's a lot of marketing genius out there,

but they don't make music.

There's a lot of musicians,

but they don't know anything about marketing.

These guys know enough about both to be very dangerous.

I just thought this was amazing.

Is this effective, you think?

I don't understand.

So they're basically doing all this to get you to buy tickets

to their New York show.

Is that right?

Well, it's not just that.

Like it's not just to buy tickets to the specific show.

It's basically the way I think about it is

every business, you gotta find a way to get like

your first hundred or first thousand customers

who love you.

And that's like a really specific thing.

It's like, I just need a thousand customers who love us.

Whether it was for this podcast,

like we needed a thousand people to listen

who actually really love the show.

And every business has this.

And so the question is like, how do you actually do that?

And at YC, they have this thing that they say,

do things that don't scale.

They talked about the early Airbnb guys,

how they used to go and they themselves would go

and call all the hosts of their New York Airbnbs.

They would go to their houses.

They would take professional looking photos

so that the listings look better.

And people were always laughing like, you know,

that's not gonna scale.

And they're like, well, first of all,

it doesn't even matter if it scales

because right now I don't need scale.

I don't have scale.

I just need something that's gonna get a thousand people

to really love us.

That's what these guys are doing.

I thought this was just an amazing example

of like actually betting on that strategy,

which is that you need a small group of people

to really love you and go to bat for you.

Not a bunch of people who just kind of sort of like you.

Or, oh yeah, we got 10,000 views on this thing.

I say, okay, but those views, do they matter?

What are those views worth

versus somebody who's got a story to tell

like I'm doing right now?

Or somebody who's really impressed by you

or feels interested in you or is invested in your story

actually goes and clicks and learns more about you

and goes deeper down your funnel.

So I think that this is amazing

because they're brute forcing that thousand fans

who really care about them.

Dude, I always hated this thing of, well, it doesn't scale

or you got to build the scale.

I've always hated that conversation for a few reasons.

Number one, most people aren't going to make it

to the point where they ever have to worry about that.

Number two, you can brute force it

and just manually and by hand do things

to a pretty large number.

I think the largest number that I've seen, let's see,

but I think Mr. Beast is his whole operation

is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

That's a pretty brute force.

Not, I don't know what it looks like,

but just talking to him, fairly unsophisticated operation.

I think when I talked to Nerdwall, it was a blog

that was at the time making like 30 million in revenue

and I think like 15 million in profit.

Incredibly, I like saw a little bit behind the scenes,

super unsophisticated.

What are some other things?

And it was basically just them just blogging.

What are some other examples of things

that you've seen that look like a tech

or internet based company on the outside

but behind the scenes are like pretty rudimentary

and not even like they've not even thought like,

oh, we need to automate or scale or whatever.

So our buddy Ryan Hoover built product time

and he listens to POT as well.

He came on the POT as well and told the story,

but I was there kind of like front row

when he was building that thing,

meaning like I think I'm user number 17

in product times history or something like that,

like very, very early, first dozen people

or so that were on the platform.

And for some of us, he was sending like updates

on like literally what he was doing to build it.

And what he was doing was every day,

he would wake up at like whatever five or six

in the morning and he would go to Phil's coffee

and he would sit down on his laptop.

He first he'd tweet out that he was at Phil's

every single day and then he would start

just literally emailing and tweeting at people

that they should be posting their product on product hunt

or hey, I posted it for you, would love to hear your comment

or hey, I noticed this product, that's a lot like yours.

I wonder if, you know, or like that's in your industry,

you should check this out.

And all he was doing was like manually being

the human notification system for product time.

He was the human invite system,

the notification system, the retention system.

He was all of it.

And at the time I was like, this guy is literally

like sending out like hundreds

of personal welcome emails a day,

maybe a hundred personalized tweets per day.

And then he would like, you know, sure enough

by six or seven PM, he'd close up his laptop,

he'd go to the gym, he's a very like structured guy.

And then he would like go home, he hits the bed early.

He's not like, you know, he's not like going out

and socializing or doing anything like that.

He'd wake up again the next day

and he would do the same thing.

And sure enough, that community that we were part of,

I think that first group he sent it to

was like maybe 25 people.

And it didn't even have his own website.

He was using this thing called LinkyDink at the time.

It was like some third party tool to go use.

And every day he would send out the email digest

in the morning of the cool stuff people posted.

And then he would tag each person with an individualized

thing, oh, Sean, I know you guys had once looked

at building a product like this.

What do you think about this?

And he'd get you to share your thoughts

because he was asking in such a nice personalized way

that, okay, I'll go ahead and reply.

But that generated all of the activity

for that early community.

And why did product not work?

Why did it sell for $20 million?

Well, because at the beginning,

he got the right people from Silicon Valley

to actually participate in the thing.

And the way he did that was like,

it's like when you watch somebody build a fire.

It's like, first they're just like,

you know, they're just hitting the flint

or they're rubbing the two sticks together

just to get the spark.

And then when it's there, they're sort of covering it.

They're just blowing on it gently.

And then they're adding just the next little

few pieces of sticks.

And they know it could go out at any moment.

And that's how it feels to build a community.

I saw you do the same thing with trends, basically, right?

Like for trends, when you wanted to launch that,

it was by no means gonna be a slam dunk.

And I think most of us who are in trends would say,

the research reports you guys sent out,

which was the product, they were cool.

But the real reason anybody liked trends,

I think, was the Facebook group.

And all it was was a Facebook group.

There was nothing, you didn't build that.

You just literally went on there and typed a title in

and hit enter.

And then, but what made the Facebook group good was

you handpicked who could get in.

And then every day I felt like you were sharing

like some super high quality stuff

to get a conversation started in the group chat.

Was that intentional when you do that?

100% it was intentional.

And so I did two or three interesting things.

So this, yeah, so trends right now is making

many, many millions of dollars in subscription revenue.

And it's pretty simple.

And there's like, I think there's only five people

who work on it.

So it's like a pretty profitable thing.

And we added these people to this Facebook group

and I would do a few things.

The first thing I would do is even people who didn't pay,

who I thought were impressive,

like you or some of our other friends,

I'd be like, hey, I'm adding you to this group.

And I would just tell them and I would manually add them.

And I'd be like, oh, look who just joined.

You know, Sean, Sean has done all these impressive things.

Funny seeing you here, how cool.

If you have any questions for Sean,

just like ask them right here in the comments.

And I would do that all the time.

So I would add these people who did the actual work.

And that worked by the way,

because I was like, oh, shit, this group has cool people.

And it's in reality that you added 300 paid members

that I've never heard of.

And then you added one interesting person,

but you made that intro post baller.

You're like, you ever seen a plane fly?

Yeah, that's because of this guy, you know?

It's like, it was always the most like baller intro.

You're like, did you know they didn't have $100 bills

till this guy came around?

It's like, wow.

I did that all the time.

And the other thing I would do is

I would just write out all these long posts

of like interesting things that I was thinking about.

And then I would tag certain people who A,

either accomplish something like that

and would talk about it.

Or B, I would write comments for smart people

and message them and say,

hey, will you do me a favor, post us on there.

Or I would write posts for other people

and make them comment one time

when HubSpot was looking to buy us.

I saw that Brian Halligan,

the founder and then CEO of the company, he joined.

And I messaged like 80 people.

And I said, hey, reply to Brian,

here's a message to say to him.

And so many people commented

and that he checked in like eight hours later

and he's like, oh my God,

I've been overwhelmed with replies and notifications.

I can't believe how thriving this community is.

And I remember thinking like, got him, got him.

But that like interaction is how you make all,

like that's that feeling you want all community members

to feel and we used to do that all the time.

But yeah, Ryan Hoover is a good example

of people who have grown without like

really caring about scaling.

We should have like a segment another time

where we like actually think about like the most like

thrown together duct tape shit that we've seen

that has gotten quite large.

And I'm gonna give you another angle towards this.

So there's one which is the brute force

do things that don't scale.

And they almost do them even longer than that.

They do it even past the point

where you shouldn't be able to keep this up.

Like Airbnb still does that photographer thing, by the way,

they turned that unscalable thing of them

going to people's apartments, taking photos for them

and saying, hey, we'll improve your listing for you.

And now they just have a fleet of photographers

around the country that'll just come do this

for your listing.

It's like, it's that they actually turned it

into a scalable thing.

And that's another thing when people talk about,

well, that's not scalable.

It's like, yeah, it is.

Like they'll talk about like an ad agency

and they're like, that's not scalable.

It's like, what do you mean?

Of course it's scalable.

You just hire 5,000 employees.

Like that's scalable.

They may be, that's not what you want to do,

but like, yeah, everything,

virtually everything is scalable.

Like you just have to add a ton of people probably.

Most things can scale past what most people think.

Like, you know, this also happens in engineering

all the time.

You work with engineers and they're like,

well, we're going to need to build it right

before we launch or we're going to need to build it right

because this won't work in production.

And so this won't work when it scales.

It's like, did you hear these stories?

It's like, yeah, Facebook was written in PHP.

Why? I don't know.

That's just the language he knew at the time.

That's what he did.

You know, it's like, and yeah, actually it still runs,

you know, years later, it was still running in that

like way past where it was supposed to.

And like-

Dude, I've got friends that are early at Uber

and friends that are still at Uber.

And a lot of people don't know this,

but the first or second employee was this Mexican guy.

And, you know, he, I think he was,

lived in America for a little while,

but at the time he was living in Mexico.

And so the early versions of Uber were written

with a ton of Spanish in the code.

And so my friends who were early there,

they told me, yeah, like,

it was kind of thrown together and kind of janky.

And I've got friends now that still work there.

And they say, every once in a while,

we'll find Spanish in the early code base

because that is, you know, what these guys are writing.

And we'll find like Spanish notes and things like that.

And that was the early version of Uber.

And think about how many rules of Uber got violated of,

how many rules of startups that Uber violated.

So for example, Uber founders, Travis and Garrett,

they didn't work on it full time.

Uber was not a project they were willing to do.

They just literally tweeted out,

hey, we need a general manager

and random guy named Ryan Graves was like,

I'm a hustler, I'll do it.

And they're like, all right, cool.

It's like, they literally like delegated the CEO job.

Then did they have a super strong technical team,

technical co-founder who could write the code

and do this in-house?

Nope, use the third party dev shop

to build the first version of the app.

They outsourced the coding.

You know, most of the investors who invested in Uber

would tell you, if you're a product guy and you go in

and you say, yeah, I'm gonna just use an agency

to write the code for the app.

They'd be like, yeah, this is not, yeah, no go.

Okay, then what's the next thing?

Then they literally broke actual laws.

It was like running and they got a cease and desist

from San Francisco saying,

hey, for every day you're operational,

you owe us $5,000 per day.

And they just kept going.

Then the next, you know, they just violated rule,

another one at the time.

I remember at the time when Uber first came out,

Airbnb was popular at the time.

And I talked to our investor and I was like,

should we be doing a product like this?

He's like, ah, no, bit's not Adam's.

That was like a common phrase in Silicon Valley,

which is you wanna do startups that are software based

because they're the ones that can scale

and have profit margins.

All these things with real world cars and homes

and t-shirts and stuff like that.

Like that stuff, super hard to scale,

ends up being super, super low margin.

And okay, and some people will say, oh, they're right.

You know, Uber's not that profitable.

But the reality is that the founders and investors

in Uber did fantastically well scaling this thing up.

And it was kind of a narrative violation.

There was all these narrative violations,

all these general rules that were broken that like today,

if you said, yeah, I'm the founder of this thing.

No, I'm not working on it full time.

I found a guy on Twitter to be the CEO

and then we're using this agency in Mexico to build the app.

Yeah, we're the next big thing that doesn't fly.

And guess what?

It worked.

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Dude, we gotta go on a quick story tangent.

There's this guy named Scott Belsky.

You know Scott?

Yeah, I like him a lot.

I like to think of friends as though the reality is

I've talked to him twice.

Yeah, friendly with him.

He invested in my company

and I've hung out with him once or twice.

He doesn't know this,

but he's kind of like, I'm his secret admirer.

He's like this good-looking handsome dude

who dresses nice and seems like really wealthy and rich

and I see him and I'm like, dude, you are the best.

And I've talked to him.

If you have $10 million at a jawline,

Jess is all in, Sam is all in.

Yeah, definitely all in.

So I love this guy and he's great.

So basically I gotta tell you a quick Scott Belsky story.

So right now he's an executive at Adobe,

but not just like an executive.

I'm pretty sure he's in line to be CEO

and a lot of people don't realize this.

Adobe is one of the 30th largest companies in the world.

I think their market cap is like $300, $400 billion.

And Scott Belsky is, he's pretty young.

He's in his early 40s.

And I cold emailed him to invest in the hustle

and that's how I became friends with him.

And I met with him one time and he goes,

yeah, so like when I was 26 years old,

I was starting my company called Behance.

So Behance is basically, it's Behance and Dribble

are like the two companies where you go online

and designers can host their portfolio

and kind of talk to one another.

And he was like, I was just starting this company.

And in my head, I knew he worked at Goldman

and I knew that he was from like a wealthy like Jewish family.

I think his grandfather started like Kaplan,

you know Kaplan University.

Oh, no way.

Yeah.

And so I was like stereotyping him as,

oh, you guys just, you had everything handed to him.

And like he told me a few stories where I was like,

oh, you actually like, it's not exactly how it seems

from the outside.

And he said, I left Goldman

and I was making 90 grand a year there.

And when I left, I had like 50 or $60,000 saved.

I started Behance.

It didn't go very well and we bootstrapped it.

And I noticed that with Behance,

we were getting a lot of traffic

from two different websites.

The first was called StumbleUpon

and people and designers would post school designs

and we would get traffic from StumbleUpon.

And the second was a small company called Pinterest.

And I emailed both these guys,

and this was, I forget what year, 2011, 2010.

He goes, I've emailed these guys.

I go, hey, you guys are sending us like hundreds

of people a day, which for us at the time

was a lot of people.

What are these websites?

And this guy, Ben told me about this website called Pinterest

and then this guy named Garrett told me about StumbleUpon.

And Ben was like, hey, I'm gonna raise a little bit of money.

Do you wanna invest at the $3 million valuation?

And Scott was like, dude,

I only have like 50 grand and,

but I don't wanna like look like a noob to this guy,

whatever, I'll invest $15,000 and that's a big deal to me.

And then Garrett was like, hey,

my friend and I are studying this other thing.

None of us are gonna work there

because I'm too busy running StumbleUpon,

but it's basically like a car service.

And Scott was like, I don't wanna invest in a limo company.

Like there's no way a limo company's gonna take off,

but like I don't wanna look like an idiot.

This guy's been sending me some traffic

and I kinda wanna like appear a little bit like a big shot.

And so he gave him $15,000.

I think at a $3.5 million valuation.

And he did both of these in the span,

I think of about two weeks.

So he's like, I basically had like 50 or 60 grand

in my checking account at the time.

My startup that I was bootstrapping was only doing okay.

It wasn't making much profit.

And I was doing consulting on the side to pay the bills,

but I did, my wife was like angry at me,

but I gave him each $15,000 fast forward.

However, many years they both went public

around the same ish time.

And I remember sending him something to his house

and he sent me his address.

And I remember the address being this like

really fancy town home and I looked it up

and I was like doing the math.

And I'm pretty sure each of these $15,000 checks

turned into around 50 to $100 million each

inside a span of like,

you'll have to look up when they went public,

but they almost went public right around the same time.

And he gave him money each at the same time.

And another thing a lot of people don't know

is Behance, his company sold I think for $175 million.

And I think he owned, he told me around 70% of it.

He owned the majority of it.

And so this guy has just knocked it out the park

over and over and over again.

And a lot of it came because of Uber and Pinterest early on.

And he was like, I don't think these are that good of ideas,

but I just, I don't want to look silly.

That's an amazing story.

I love that story.

It reminds me, I just got a DM from this guy.

By the way, this is nowhere near related.

I'm not trying to compare apples to apples here.

It's very hard to have a story

that compares to Uber and Pinterest.

But there's a guy who, I don't know,

maybe six months ago or nine months ago, something like that.

I was like getting kind of interested

in the AI stuff about basically artificial intelligence.

I can create art and things like that.

And I had said something offhand on the pod.

So somebody reached out and they were like,

hey, heard your interest in this.

I'm trying to make apps that will do this.

We just released our first one.

And I want to see what you think about it.

And we're raising a little bit of money.

We'd love to see if you want to invest.

Never replied.

I get another DM or no, I see somebody mention this app

and I go, I go click on the founder and I click the DM.

Oh, this guy DM me a while back saying,

invest, I should see how it's going.

So I go, hey, how's the biz going?

I'll share a screen show of this.

Hey, how's the biz going?

And he goes, good man, good.

Yeah, that app, I really ended up releasing it.

It's been downloaded 120 million times.

And then I released another one

and it's also been downloaded like 100 million times.

And yeah, it's really, it's going really well, man.

How are you?

I was like, well, I'm currently walking off of a cliff

because I never responded to that initial DM.

You were probably like, well, I recently switched

from Trader Joe's to Whole Foods, I've been tearing with that.

I just did my 401k match, that was really fascinating.

You just replied, not much, you.

That's crazy.

I want to share one other story

that's kind of related to the do things that don't scale.

This is something I actually learned

from those guys Dylan and Henry.

So I'm a big fan of this like idea

that you have to find a way to learn

from three groups of people,

people that have done it before.

So people who have done it a bunch of times.

So that's, you know, people normally try to go learn

from that mentor type of people.

People that are in the game,

they're peers just alongside you.

That's kind of how we got to know each other.

We were in a peer group, a mastermind group.

And no, we haven't made it,

but like we're all trying to make it at the same time.

And so we can learn a lot from each other.

And then lastly is people who are just starting out

in the game fresh, they don't know any better.

And there's a certain tactic to like A,

spend time with each of those three groups.

And then B, be humble enough

and know how to ask the right question

so that you know how to actually get advice

from all three of those groups.

Cause if you ask the same question to all three,

you're not going to get valid information.

You're not going to get the right answers from all three.

Right? Like the question you would ask

to somebody who's been through it before

and the things you should talk to them about

are different than the ones that you should talk to your,

your buddy who's going through it right now.

And the 19 year old who just graduated from college,

you can't ask the same question.

So I tell you something that the sort of the 19, 21 year old

or whatever, I don't know how old they were at the time,

maybe 21, 22, Dylan and Henry, they were fans of the pod.

Then they flew, they offered to come help us

with our video setups at the time.

Well, and previously they were fans of the pod

and they would chop up clips for us

and shared on social media.

And a lot of their videos were beautiful, awesome.

And they just brute force their way

to having a relationship with us.

They, exactly, and that became a full on agency

that does, you know, pretty well.

They, they did it for us

and they did it for the all in podcast.

They did it for a bunch of people

and so people kind of know them now.

But at the time, nobody really knew who they were.

They were just guys who just graduated from college.

They had their own podcast, which was kind of like ours,

but no, you know, you go, you can go look at the views.

Nobody, nobody watches the thing, but that's okay.

Like, you know, it's most podcasts nobody listens to,

especially ones by guys who just graduated from college,

but they flew out to our house there

and they were installing the like kind of studio setup

in my garage at the time.

And I went out there and I was like,

you guys need some water?

You guys, like, you guys all right?

You guys, are you guys eating anything?

I was like, kind of like parenting them.

I was like, you know, are you guys okay?

What are you doing here?

And so I went out there

and I started shooting the shit with them.

I was talking to them and I was like,

so what's your guys is like,

I was like, give me advice.

Like, if I was your friend and I'm like,

you guys got a podcast, that's pretty cool.

Like most people you raised don't have a podcast.

Like, what do you, what's y'all strategy?

What are you trying to do?

Why are you trying to do it?

What are you trying to do?

And I was like, explain it to me like I was your buddy.

And they're like, well, you know,

we kind of, we like podcasting.

It's fun.

So that's why we do it.

The second thing is we just think that like making content,

like we don't have money to go advertise.

We don't have like, we don't have connections

that we could just go knock on a door

and get into some, get distribution somewhere.

So like content is our only chance.

So we just wanted to get good at content.

The best way to get good is just to do it a bunch.

I was like, all right, it's another smart thing.

And I go, but nobody's watching your shit, right?

So like, is it even working?

It's kind of like what you were saying about this band thing.

Like, does this even work?

Like, this is cool.

It's interesting, but is this valuable?

Like, is this actually going to work?

Yeah.

And he goes, oh, I'm just waiting.

He goes, nobody watches it today.

He goes, but someday if we start to get people to watch,

there is now a library.

He goes, we call it our binge bank.

It's a place where you can go

and you can binge Dylan and Henry.

And I was like, what?

And he's like, yeah, basically we just want to have a rabbit hole

for you to go down.

Cause if anybody ever gets it, like today nobody's interested,

but if people ever get interested,

I want to have this bank of content that they can go binge.

And sure enough, after like, you know,

45 minutes down this rabbit hole,

you're going to walk out being like,

I think I love these guys.

I feel like I know these guys

and I want to hang out or work with these guys.

And I heard that and I was like, that's really fucking smart.

I was like, that's the way to think about content.

Cause most content doesn't just like immediately hit

and blow up, but you want to have this.

And I thought about it cause I was like,

there are several people who I've gone down

that rabbit hole with.

And I've come out with that same exact conclusion

after a 45 minute dig.

You do this all the time.

Like you discover somebody,

you go read everything there is about them.

You go read their old blog,

you watch their old talks and you come out,

you've been like, this guy is awesome.

This girl is amazing.

And they had to create that like library of themselves,

that personal library to go and let you binge.

And I thought about it because you know the band,

like the guy Macklemore, the like the famous rapper guy.

I remember maybe 10 years ago now,

me and my buddy Trevor, we started like,

we like found his one of his songs.

And we were like, oh, this guy's cool.

Who is this guy?

And he had a binge bank.

He had these vlogs he was doing on YouTube

of him like trying to make it as a rapper.

It'd be like, we're going to do in this show

at this small college in Wichita.

Oh, we like, we're waiting every day right now.

We're waking up at this time.

We're trying to record in the studio cause we suck at,

the creative process.

So we're just trying to train ourselves, right?

They were just like, just kind of sharing along the way.

And we watched this stuff and we were like,

I remember these videos had less than a thousand views.

There were like 700 views on YouTube at the time.

Like I just went back and looked at it.

Now those have each like millions

or like close to a million views,

each on those videos at the time, less than a thousand.

And we became super fans of this guy.

Why?

Because it's fun to be early.

We liked what they were all about.

And we felt like the quality of content

was like higher than the views.

And so that made it for like an exciting,

it's like we found a treasure.

Dude, people say that in our comments on YouTube.

Like, oh, I'm surprised this isn't bigger

or like I'm happy to be here before this is big.

Yeah, they're like, I'm happy we're catching up.

Yeah.

And that definitely gives me encouragement.

It makes me happy.

But yeah, people say that in our,

little do they know that like our podcast

has like 10 times more downloads.

So they're like, oh, this little shitty podcast

only has 10,000 videos on this thing

or 10,000 views on this thing.

And I'm like, yeah, we suck.

Sure.

Yeah, please share, please.

Yeah.

But I'm a big fan of this binge bank concept.

I once I, once I, they said that, that clicked with me.

I started thinking about our stuff that way.

And then also I started remembering, yeah,

there's actually a bunch of people

who I've gone down there rabbit hole and like,

and actually there could be like a product that's like this.

I know YouTube is kind of structured this way,

but I kind of wish that you could just have a thing

which is like your greatest hits.

It's like, yo, if you, if you're kind of interested in me,

this is the curated rabbit hole.

It's like, this was my tweet that went viral.

This is this video.

This was the first thing I ever made.

This was, you know, this blog post I wrote back in the day

is kind of stupid, but like, you know,

it captured how I was thinking at the time.

I have two tools that I use regularly

and I'm paying subscribers of the first.

And do you read a lot of biographies?

No, none.

So I read a ton of biographies.

Take over the world.

Yeah, I read a ton of biographies.

And so any biography that talks about a person

who is a little bit pre-internet era,

I'm a subscriber of newspapers.com,

which has aggregated like every newspaper ever.

So like, for example, I was reading a biography

about Dan Gilbert or something about Dan Gilbert,

the founder of Rocket Mortgage.

I think it's called the guy who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers

or I forget, he owns everything.

And so like his company got,

it was called Rock Financial originally.

His company got popular in the nineties.

And so I just Google Rock Financial Dan Gilbert

set newspapers.com to 1985.

So I knew that's when he started to 1990

and then went public in 92.

So I was like, I'm gonna find everything.

I read all of these articles about him before he was like,

you know, it was like really like

he was in the making at that point.

And so that's like my favorite tools, newspapers.com.

The second one for anything that's internet related

is web archive.

So like whenever I talk to anyone

who's like popular on the internet,

I go and look back at right when they started,

I like to look at their old websites

and you could like see the trend

and you could see the trajectory.

And that starts, that teaches me a little bit

about patterns and like, all right, it's okay.

And it also makes me feel like, all right,

it's okay to be shitty even at this size.

It's okay to be only okay around this size.

You know what I mean?

Totally, totally, yeah.

You go look at early startup landing pages.

I have a blog post about this actually,

like 10 throwback landing pages.

And it's like, go look at the first version of Airbnb,

of Uber, of Snapchat, of all these things.

And then you'll be like,

oh, why are we trying to perfect this before lunch?

Like, if you could start there

and end up where these guys did,

like I can start wherever the hell I am now

and launch and then make it better over time.

So this guy DMed me and I found his YouTube video

and it was really amazing.

So basically, this has got me thinking on this whole topic,

but in 2014, this guy graduated from Stanford

and he got five job offers.

And he did this video that he goes,

here's the offers that I got in 2014

and here's what happened.

And here's like how like this story played out.

So in the video, it's really great.

So if you Google like Rahul Tech Jobs,

and I bet you it will come up.

So basically, I'm gonna summarize it,

but the video is great,

but here's basically the offers that he got.

So the offers that he got from Twitter

with a combination of stock and salary was 190,000.

With a combination of stock and cash,

his Facebook offer was $200,000 a year.

His Microsoft one was around also $200,000 a year.

His Square one around $160,000 a year.

And this is both a combination of stock,

equity and sign up bonus.

And his Google one was $250,000 a year.

Now, fast forward eight years,

what would that stock plus cash be worth?

So basically the cash is mostly stagnant.

I think he added like an 8% annual growth.

The stock, he looks at what it grew since then.

So his Twitter comp, fast forward,

it would almost be the same

because their stock hasn't grown.

His Facebook stock, it actually would have gone

a lot higher, but right now Facebook stock is down a ton.

And so his Facebook's first year comp

went from 200 to 220.

His Microsoft comp, it started at 200.

If you fast forward today,

it would be worth around $300,000 a year.

Now, here's where things get interesting.

His Square stuff, and he was only 22

when he graduated or something like that.

And his first year's salary and comp back then

would be $160,000.

Fast forward, the stock is now worth a $580,000.

And his Google stuff was worth $250,000 a year,

now worth almost $700,000 a year.

So here's a few takeaways from this, the first takeaway.

He said this funny thing in the video.

He goes, Square offered me something

that I didn't think was any good

because the recruiter said, you know,

if Square one day becomes a $7 billion company,

the stock that we're offering you now,

it's only worth $100,000 over four years.

It could be worth $400,000.

But he goes, I'm really doubtful

that Square will ever be a $7 billion company.

Now it's worth $50 billion, and it's down right now.

I think at its peak it was $70 billion.

So the thing that is really hard to understand

is that everything at the time,

most things seem expensive.

And the reason why things seem expensive

is because exponential growth

is incredibly challenging to understand.

So if I tell you that something is gonna grow

at 7% a year every single year,

that's actually kind of hard to understand.

But what that means is it's gonna double every 10 years.

If it's gonna grow at 30% a year,

which a lot of these tech companies are,

that means it's gonna double, I think,

every two or three years.

And like exponential growth is really hard to understand.

Another thing that is really interesting

is leveraging offers and negotiating is very possible,

even if you're a 22, 23, 24 year old.

And so you always do better

when you have another offer in hand

and you play them off on another.

And finally, the most important thing for people listening,

employees at tech companies,

100% can get meaningfully rich.

And people don't talk about that enough

because it's a fairly safe way.

If you are good enough, it's a high bar.

If you are good enough to get,

but it's still like a million plus jobs

if you add together FANG,

and they hire tens of thousands

or hundreds of thousands a year.

So it's not like that coveted.

But if you can get a job at one of these tech companies,

and I'm talking about a tech company that's growing quickly

and has at least 1,000 employees, relatively safe,

it is such a good way to build wealth in a low risk way.

And the final most important thing on top of that

is now's the time.

So you're talking about Square being worth,

like, you know, it might be worth $7 billion.

I have a very small lens here,

but I see what the private company valuations are.

They have reset, and even better,

the public companies have reset.

So we have Square, Facebook, Twilio, maybe Robinhood.

I think like a company like HubSpot,

or something like that, a Coinbase,

all these valuations are pretty low, if you ask me.

And I think now's the time

where you can get some of these offers,

where you're getting paid $100, $200, $300 a year in equity,

and that could be worth potentially eight figures

in 10 years.

That's really interesting and a great ad for HubSpot.

Very well done, very native.

I enjoyed that one.

When we were selling Bevo,

we had a bunch of conversations,

and then, you know, you sort of compare offers.

You're like, all right, we had,

I think at the end, we ended up with three offers.

We had a Facebook offer, we had the Twitch offer,

and we had a, not papered,

but like only because we turned it down early,

but he was interested, the Discord offer.

And I did an exercise recently,

where I looked back and I said,

what was I thinking then, because I wrote it all down,

and how did it actually play out?

And I'll be damned if I wasn't wrong

on every single thing I believed.

Yeah, let's talk through this.

Yeah, let's go through each one.

So for example, we'll start with the one

that's relevant to what you're talking about,

which is the stock.

So basically, Discord was like,

look, we like you guys, we think this is cool,

but there's no way we would come up with cash

like you're talking about.

So it would need to be just a tiny bit of cash,

and then mostly stock.

But like, we think our stock is great.

So what would, let's say you walked away

with a million dollars of Discord stock back then,

and back then it wasn't that long ago,

that was four years ago?

Yeah, less than four years, three, four years ago,

something like that.

So at the time, I went and talked to one

of Discord's investors and I was like,

what do you think about this?

And they were like, well, it's real simple.

Like today, let's say Discord is valued

just around one and a half, two billion.

So let's say two billion, or no,

I think at the time Discord was valued at a billion,

and it was one billion then.

And he goes, you're basically just betting

that Discord can be worth five billion.

If it gets to five, then this is the best offer.

And if it's not going to get to five,

then this is the worst offer.

And so you just have to like, you know,

make an educated decision about that.

And I was like, in my head, I was like, well,

I do like, I was a big admirer of Discord.

I was like, Discord is kind of amazing.

The CEO at Discord, Jason, he's kind of amazing.

Of all the meetings that we took,

I thought he was the,

he was actually the most impressive in there.

And he cut straight to the chase and was like, yeah,

I'll do this, you know, the cash is going to be small,

maybe one, two, three million,

and then the rest will be stock.

And so, you know, you guys have to,

is that interesting to you?

And at the time I was like, no,

because that sounds really speculative and like illiquid.

And like, I can't go buy anything cool.

And I can't like, the total number as valued today

sounds way lower.

And in my head, I was just like, I can't do this.

Fast forward, Discord I think is worth

about 15 billion now.

So it would have been by far the best deal.

If they gave you a million dollars of stock

and private valuations,

that would be worth $15 million now in four years, right?

Right.

And we were getting more than a million dollars of stock

if we had done that deal.

Okay.

So it was the worst deal.

It would have turned out to be that.

So now that there was one caveat,

which is it was going to be vested.

So, you know, I'd also have to spend, you know,

three years earning that stock

or four years earning that stock, which I didn't.

Yeah, you probably would have been fired way before that.

Yeah, so, you know,

what are the odds I was going to capture all that?

I don't know.

But like, it just shows, you know,

how our brain is not really like,

the idea of Discord becoming worth 15 billion was not really,

like it didn't seem very likely,

but in actuality, the odds were probably in its favor,

but it seemed like a very low probability thing.

Cause it just sounded big.

It sounded like a big jump.

It's like, am I betting that discords

are going to become 15 times bigger than it is today?

And actually, yeah, it did.

Like the user base grew by two or three X,

the monetization grew, the overall market grew, right?

There's like all these different ways

that you just multiply these things together

and you get to arrive at this private market valuation.

Now, and also whatever, private markets have corrected.

Maybe it's not worth as much now,

but like, you know, it's hard to say, it's illiquid.

Then the next one is the Facebook offer.

And it's like, all right, well,

Facebook's offer is higher in cash, higher in stock,

but we don't know about this.

We don't know exactly,

which stocks are going to perform better,

Facebook or Amazon, they both seem like great stocks.

And so then it came down to intangible factors.

And we ended up ruling out Facebook

for some intangible factors,

which were in retrospect,

somewhat silly reasons to decide.

The first was like Twitch was the leader in game streaming

and Facebook was like,

nobody watches game streaming on Facebook at the time.

And I was like, man,

this is just going to be like another startup.

Like they're called Facebook,

but like in this niche, they're at zero

and they're hoping that we can help them win.

And like, man, we're going to be pushing a boulder up a hill.

I was like, I just want to go join the Warriors

and like go play on the winning team.

Facebook just hadn't decided they were going to win yet.

Yeah, exactly.

And also like my mentor was like,

that's such a stupid way to think about this.

Like you're going to walk into Facebook

and they're going to be like, cool,

game streaming is over here.

And you're going to be like, actually,

I'm going to wander around this area over here.

I'm going to go play in virtual reality.

I'm going to go to AI.

I'm going to go to, you know, news.

I'm going to get, he's like,

you can just walk into any other department you want

and just go do that thing.

He's like, they'll forget you even exist

after they hire you.

Like you're worried about what your day to day life

is going to be like there.

And like you have no idea what your day to day life

is going to be like there.

And he was absolutely right.

By the way, have you ever been to the Facebook campus?

Yeah.

It's basically just like better college.

The way that I describe it,

it's like a mall where everything's free.

So like they have like a food court

and they don't have just one pizza place.

They've got many pizza places.

And it's one of my wife worked there

and I would go and I'm like,

oh, this is the best thing ever.

And they have restaurants like a sushi restaurant.

Everything's free.

They've got a ice cream place.

Everything's free.

They've got a woodworking shop.

Everything's free.

A laundry place, a barber, a dentist.

A barber, that's the biggest one.

I was like, food I expected.

But when I just saw you just walk over to this guy

and get a haircut, I was like, damn, that was like,

that was like a big draw for me.

I was like, I could just, I don't have to go anywhere.

It's just free.

I just walk in and get a haircut.

That's kind of amazing.

Yeah, they're like, it's free.

All you have to give us is your life.

Yeah.

Deal?

Yeah.

Did you say there's two pizza shops on campus?

How much of the Facebook,

so a million in Facebook back four years ago

would be worth what?

A million in Facebook stock would have been,

it's gone, I think, up 30% since then.

So it's like, a million would have been 1.3, right?

So that's where the stock landed.

At its peak, it was about double.

So at its peak, it would have been double, right?

And so in that one, we made the mistake

of basically optimizing for really intangible things.

One that seemed really tangible was like,

they weren't going to take our whole team.

And I was like, oh, I don't want to toast

at the celebration party of this acquisition

and be like, but not you four.

They didn't hire you guys.

So like, you know, it's been awesome.

The rest of us were going to go

and you guys, you won't believe the recommendation letter.

I'm going to write you, right?

Yeah, here's some cab money.

Thanks for your last night.

Yeah, exactly.

So that wasn't going to feel good.

Of course, as soon as we rejected them

and they were like, why?

And I was like, well, the team thing, they're like,

dude, we would have just hired them a few months later.

We just didn't have the headcount yet.

Like, he's like, that's why.

And I was like, yeah, and the commute was really far down there.

He's like, dude, we have an SF office.

We could have got you in.

I was like, oh, yeah, I guess I should.

Also, the commute, they have a bus,

like a bus that basically has like a restaurant, cafe,

like toilet, internet, TV on the bus.

It's not even a real commute anymore.

Yeah, people on the bus complained.

They're like, oh my God, like the line for the pedicure

on the bus was so long this morning.

It's like, I don't know what you're complaining about.

Anyway, so we made a decision.

We made, we made a really hard decision.

And it, whatever, it ended up fine.

But I guess like my point is,

it's really hard to forecast and predict these things.

And especially hard to forecast and predict

what stock is gonna be worth down the road.

That's awesome.

So I have another topic that I wanna go to.

All right.

Two quick ideas.

One is around what I just talked about, predictions.

So there's this company that Brandon sent me

that's called Pressy Taste.

I don't even know what this is, it's a horrible name.

Pressy Taste.

You go to pressytaste.prcitaste.com.

And it's some kind of like,

basically it's a prediction engine.

I don't even honestly know exactly how this works,

but basically what it's doing is,

it's using data like cameras, like historical trends,

whatever.

And what it's trying to do is tell the person in the back

how many burgers to put on the stove.

Like how many fries to take out of the freezer?

Cause it's basically like,

how can we help you predict demand?

And so this idea aside,

I actually think that there's like a lot of different ways

where this is really valuable.

So for example, we own an e-commerce store

and we're always trying to predict like,

how much inventory should we order?

We're ordering, you know,

six to nine months in advance sometimes.

And it's so hard to forecast,

what's the world gonna be like six months from now?

It's like, oh yeah, turns out there was a pandemic,

a war, like, you know,

stimmy checks that like caused everything to go up

and then like everything to go down

and then shipping broke.

And like, it was impossible to predict.

But every better prediction saves us a lot of money.

And so I actually think that there's like

a whole bunch of business problems

that entrepreneurs could go after

that basically just help you predict

how much demand there will be.

There's a couple of different ways you could go about this.

So for example, for our e-commerce store,

it'd be nice to know how other e-commerce stores are trending.

Are we all trending up, trending down

by how much percent year over year in our category?

Cause that would kind of tell us

like where the overall market demand is.

Another prediction might be, you know,

if I'm a restaurant, what is the foot traffic

or the sort of drive through traffic

like this time of year, right?

September or in this weather pattern,

how much traffic should I expect today?

That might tell me what I need for staffing

and for, you know, food today versus any other day.

And if you just think about like,

if you can be smarter and cut waste

by 10 to 15% in these types of businesses

and these types of industries,

that's probably gonna add up into like the tens of billions

or hundreds of billions of dollars

per year of money saved.

And so I think these businesses were very interesting.

This whole like demand prediction industry

is very interesting to me.

Dude, I have done a ton of research

in the trends predicting business.

Obviously, like we have this thing called trends.

And before launching that, I was like, what, what do we do?

I think I told you about this years ago,

but everything I'm about to say,

it's from years ago of research

and I'm doing it mostly off memory.

So I'm gonna be a little bit off, but not totally off.

But have you heard of this company called WGSN?

I think I told you about them.

Yeah, they're the ones who like, they like say like,

the color of the year is lavender

and the smell of the year is like, you know,

you lily or whatever.

But listen to this.

So they're publicly traded.

So these numbers are actually facts.

So the 2021 revenue was 91 million pounds.

It's a British company.

So 91 million pounds.

So I don't know what that would be.

Like $30, yeah, something like that.

Yeah, like I don't know the conversion of monopoly money.

It's a real money, but no, 91 million pounds.

Listen to their adjusted or their EBITDA was 41 million.

So basically for every dollar they made,

45 was like net income profit.

And what they do is they tell you

which colors are gonna be popular.

And I'm pretty sure the product,

they only have 6,500 customers.

So they're paying like 25 grand a year

or something like that.

And I think the product basically is a quarterly PDF

that tells you what colors they think might be popular.

And I'm almost positive.

The way that they get this is they put like tablets

at fashion schools and they just ask students

like what they're feeling, what they're liking,

things like that.

So it's like, they're asking fashion people,

I guess the people who are like,

I guess they like, like, are you a hipster?

Are you a gay guy who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn?

Like what, like whatever you, the qualifications are

for like you are, whatever you think is cool,

the normies, you know, like me are gonna like start wearing.

You know what I'm saying?

Like what do you think is-

Nine months later, 10 months later, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, do you, are you an 18 year old

who has 100,000 followers on TikTok?

Check, okay.

So like whatever they think there's gonna be cool,

that's what they like, what they predict is gonna be cool.

And it's just a PDF.

And a real life use case of this is like Starbucks

is gonna like make 100,000 uniforms.

Millennial pink is the new color.

So therefore let's make sure our name tags are this color.

So it's a no brainer to spend $25,000 to get this

like quarterly PDF, as well as the ability to like DM

someone who works at WGSN and say like,

which shade of green is like the thing

that we should be using?

And so that's an interesting business

in this trend predicting space.

I talked to somebody who does like a fashion company

or whatever and they were like-

A fashion company or whatever.

Yeah, as you can tell, I wear a blue shirt.

My fashion sense is, you know,

it's frozen in like the third grade, right?

Like I was right in cursive the last time

I thought about fashion.

And they were like lemons so in this year.

And I was like, I didn't understand

what they were talking about.

What does that mean?

A lemon fruit?

I thought they were talking about like literally

like what you eat.

And they were like, no, as like a print

or a pattern or a color.

And I was like, okay, it sounds like you're just

making things up and they just pulled up their dashboard

and they were like, no, like, look at the difference

between like lemon and pineapple.

And it's like, lemon is spiking.

We're everywhere recently, weren't they?

It was a bad example, but it was like, you know,

basically like you just pick, is apples hot right now?

No, apples are fucking out, dude.

Apples are like, you know, they're so out right now.

Lemons are so in, pineapples are so in,

llamas are so in.

It's like a picture of a lemon on a shirt.

Yeah, like a design with a lemon on it

or a pattern or whatever, right?

Like, or, you know, same thing with like scents

and color palettes and things like that.

And so, and I was like, there's no way.

I was like, this is all just like, you know,

isn't this just, you know, ad agency fluff?

They're just fluffing each other

with these like, you know, random ass like things.

And they're like, no, like this stuff

is like the Bible to us.

We need to know what people are caring about

in order to do that.

I don't know if it's this exact WSN or whatever.

I don't know if that's the exact one,

but they're like this concept of like knowing

which colors, which scents, which styles,

which are like patterns are in.

That's so exhausting.

Yeah, it sounds like a horrible business to be in.

Like if I'm gonna be in the fashion business,

I'm gonna be in the men's tuxedo business.

That shit has not changed for literally great years.

Have you seen Jack and Titanic?

No, not even that shit.

Like that's the same shit.

I'm going straight, big and tall for men.

Cause literally the only criteria is like, do you fit?

You fit?

If you fit, you're in.

If you don't fit, you're out.

That's your only, I was like, that's what I like.

I like a simple yes or no when it comes to fashion.

It's just, do you fit or not?

Cause I just can't find stuff that fits.

You're in, fashion's exhausting.

That's not a business I want to be in.

Although I do think like there are some brands.

You know what brand fricking crushes it

and I never buy any other stuff though

because it's just too expensive.

But a Louis Vuitton, they're like suitcases.

Louis Vuitton, yeah, LP.

Dude, they've crushed it for like 150, 200 years.

And it's the same ass logo, the same colors.

And it's just timeless.

I do love those timeless things.

They do kill it.

There's like a little arbitrage going around.

I don't know if you've seen this,

but like a few months ago, somebody said this.

They're like, cause the dollar and the euro like got to parity

and the luxury stores hadn't changed the prices.

So basically like things were always typically priced

higher in dollars than in euros or whatever.

Might get that backwards.

But like the Louis Vuitton bag, if you were in Paris,

you could buy it in euros for a certain price.

That same bag was selling for more that same day

if you just sold it in US dollars to a US customer.

And in Paris, you would also get the VAT refund.

So you'd get, you'd basically net getting something like

30 to 35% under market.

And that was like your spread

that you could then go and sell it for in the United States.

It was like kind of crazy.

And so there's like a whole businesses

that are around these like the version of a drug mule.

So it's like, you can just pay someone who's traveling

to like stuff a Louis Vuitton bag in their suitcase

and bring it over for you across the border.

Just because like, you know,

flying to Europe to do this yourself,

it's kind of inconvenient.

There's already people flying from Europe

to the US every day.

And so there's whole businesses that are based around

this like travel arbitrage and flippers like that.

I just did research on one of these that I discovered.

It's called Grabber.

So the URL is G-R-A-B-R dot I-O.

So they went with like the misspelling and the dot I-O.

So you know, they're really a startup,

but it's grabber.io and their whole shick is

shop anywhere, travel everywhere.

I guess that's a really bad tagline.

But basically what it means is it connects you

with people who are with these drug mules,

these Louis Vuitton mules.

It connects you with people who are going to

overseas places and they'll buy shit for you

and you'll give them the money

and it's like a marketplace for that.

This is, I've got the stupid example of that.

There's this thing called a Wicked Laser

because I'm like a grown up.

I'm like.

Is the Wicked part just like yourself describing

a standard laser or is it actually called that?

I'm like 12 year old with money.

Basically there's these.

I found this laser online, this laser pointer online

that's so strong that they made it illegal in America.

And if you shine something like a piece of paper,

it catches fire and you can't have it

because it reaches jets in the air.

And it's a Chinese company.

And obviously I saw this laser and it's a $300 laser,

but you could only ship it to someone in Canada.

And I'm like, I want a laser that can light shit on fire.

Like why do you not want that?

That will go perfect in my collection of like tasers.

This one laser, I have a BB gun.

A laser, a laser from Benz Warehouse and my laser.

So I had to find someone who would buy this

in China for me and get it from Canada to America

for my $300 laser.

Wow.

You should go work at grabber.io.

That's what you should go do.

We're just going to sponsor every incel like subreddit.

Like, do you like lasers?

Tired of not getting your laser?

Tired of driving to Canada for your favorite lasers?

Use grabber.

Someone will grab it for you and bring it to you.

12-year-old with money.

This is so stupid.

I saw this TikTok, speaking of cool lasers.

I saw this TikTok of a laser pointer

that somebody was in their bed and they're pointing it

at their light switch and they go, watch this.

They just held it on the light switch, they go,

and they apply just enough pressure

just to turn it off.

And I'm like, this is not real.

I was like, I don't know how this is edited.

But I was like, the comments were like,

bro, this is not real, but like, how is it working?

How does it work though?

I know this one isn't real, but could it happen?

Because imagine not having to get out of your bed

to turn your light off at night,

just grabbing your laser pointer off the bed stand

and turning your light off.

Dude, so just imagine getting an Instagram ad

where you see a guy go, watch this,

and he shines something across the room

and it lights it on fire.

That's what I got called with these wicked lasers.

Wait, so how did the light switch go down?

No, man, I never got to the bottom of it.

I liked and followed to find out for part two.

Got me.

They said if I didn't forward that,

that take back to 10 people,

my family would die of lasers, so I had to do it.

Oh my God, so stupid.

I want to tell you about another thing

that's kind of interesting.

So, you know, like, I think you met up with this guy.

I think his name, he's like strip mall guy on Twitter.

Yeah, yeah, I know his real identity.

Is this the same guy?

I'm one of the few people, yeah.

No, well, strip ball guy is his fake name,

so it's be Trent.

No, there's another guy who's real straight.

Maybe they're two different guys.

All right, I think strip ball guy.

Maybe Trent and strip mall guy.

Yeah, I met up with the strip ball guy

and we became friends,

and so I have to make sure

I don't accidentally say his name.

So one of those guys, I forgot which one now, sorry,

tweeted about private security.

And it caught my eye because he goes,

man, private security is booming right now.

I know so many, I've seen so many cops who've retired

and just doing this because it's better money.

And I was like, what?

Okay, tell me more.

And so I started looking into this

and basically very briefly,

but do you know much about this

like private security trend or industry?

I know that we used to hire them for our events

because the insurance made you have one.

And you and I had a buddy who we knew,

or a friend of a friend who started a security business.

He started like an Uber for bodyguards, right?

Did it work?

He tried, no, that one failed,

but he tried to make it like sexy.

It's like he just needed to do it, not sexy.

So basically, okay, so there's some big players

in this thing, so private security.

So there's companies like Securitas,

or if you just go to aus.com,

it's Allied Universal Security,

which I think is like-

Both of those are multi-billion dollar companies.

Yeah, so one's 11 billion, the other one's 7 billion.

I think they do everything from mall cops,

to airports, to events, to whatever else.

But it goes smaller and smaller and more niche down.

As you go, corporate security.

So for example, I remember when I was working at a company,

I saw on the CEO's calendar a meeting

that was like with the private security detail

to go over like the latest updates to the private security.

And I was like, you got private security?

And it's like, well, yeah, like, you know,

it's worth rich, worth a lot.

Like, you know, like it's worth a lot to this company.

So the company literally pays for private security

for the executives to be able to, you know,

to go out and do their thing and be safe.

And so I found this kind of interesting.

And it makes sense to me that there's like

a private world out there for kind of like retired,

either army, military or police that might be higher paying

and potentially, you know, an easier job

than what they're doing today.

Yeah, I, you know, like Zuckerberg and Bezos,

they release what their security budget is each year.

And I think Bezos was six million,

which is to me not a lot of money.

Facebook, they said last year 26 million

was spent on Zuckerberg and his family,

which was 6% higher than in 2020.

So that's kind of crazy, right?

26 million just on his personal security.

You know how many people work, work for the Secret Service?

No.

6,000.

You know how many people they protect?

Yeah, you know how many people they protect?

25, 25 people.

Spoken like a man who owns a taser and a laser.

Dude, I just, no, I met a Secret Service agent

at a wedding this weekend and I just asked them everything.

I go, tell me everything.

And I, you know, they couldn't tell me anything really.

Yeah, I was going to say, pretty shitty Secret Service guy.

He's like, big fan of the pot, happy to share.

They just read out the Wikipedia to me,

but like it was pretty interesting.

That's cool.

No, I don't know anything about security,

but I think it's, but I think it's interesting.

Speaking of Tik Tok, there was a Tik Tok of a guy

who saw Jeff Bezos on the corner in Seattle,

just like waiting to cross the street.

And he's just like, hey, Jeff.

And he like had his Tik Tok recording or whatever.

And he's like, you know, how's it going today?

Whatever he's like, go and fantastic.

And he's like, you know, he's ready to like walk across street.

And they go, and somebody in the comments was like,

the top comment was like,

check out the hand of the security guy.

And you look, and he had basically a false,

I think it was like a false hand.

And his, and basically his real hand is like in his pocket,

like probably holding a gun or a taser of some,

or some kind of weapon.

And he just had like a kind of a fake hand out.

And I saw that I was like, that's awesome.

That's awesome.

Dude, you know what's even weirder is,

there was a, I'm a UFC super fan.

There was a fight backstage amongst the UFC fighters

and security got involved.

And I kept wondering, who the fuck is doing UFC security

to keep the UFC fighters from not fighting each other?

Yeah, you know what I mean?

Like what, like what type of job are they getting into?

You know what I mean?

Like they just see like something happening

and like, what are you going to do?

Well, you saw the woman that Dana White hired,

the Best Buy lady, did you see this?

Yeah, she was a football player.

She like kept the woman or someone was trying to rob

the Best Buy and she like got down low and like an O line.

Like it was like pushing her out of the way.

Yeah, the robber was trying to run out the store

and the security guard from Best Buy just starts blocking

this person from getting this guy from getting out.

And he's like, he's desperately trying to get out

because he can't just be like stealing

and just get caught inside the store.

And she just ends up tackling him into like a bunch of boxes.

She gets fired from Best Buy

because Best Buy is like, hey liability,

you attacked somebody in our store.

And she's like, oh my God, I'm doing my job.

I'm a security guard at Best Buy.

What did you want me to do?

And Dana White was like, that's bullshit.

Like he went on Instagram and was like,

who is this woman?

I want to hire her.

And she's like now he's like personal security guard

or something like that.

Like she works for them.

No shit, really?

Yeah.

Dude, I always see those guys and I'm like, who?

Like you need like an Israeli trained like secret service

agent to like, I mean, who are you going to have

to protect a UFC fighter from hitting another UFC fighter?

It's all the ex Jerry Springer security guards

that have years of experience breaking this up.

This episode is really good off a tangent,

but do you remember how, remember Steve,

the security guard from Jerry Springer?

He was like, yeah, he has his own van.

Probably like the top earner on cameo right now.

Next to Kevin from the office or Gilbert Godfroyd.

Oh, shoot.

I think Gilbert just died actually, RIP, but whatever.

I guess that's the episode.

Did you know that DMX died?

Yeah, dude.

Yeah, I saw that.

You treated it out.

Why didn't you tell me?

You knew this information, you without it?

Reminds me of what Dave Chappelle-

You know I don't leave my house?

Dave Chappelle was talking about like celebrities

and how it's weird.

They talked to them during tragedies

and he's like, just imagine like 9-11

and Ja Rule was like being interviewed actually.

And they're like, you know, we need Ja right now

to make sense of this tragedy.

Where's Ja?

Where's Ja?

Someone go give me Ja, we need Ja to make sense

of this tragedy.

That's like you wondering like,

why didn't anyone fill me in that DMX had passed?

By the way, did you see this?

This blog post, we'll close

on this little last random thing,

but check out this blog post.

So this guy listened to the episode

that we did with Rob Dierdek,

which is probably, I don't know,

if not the most popular episode we did,

one of the most popular episodes we've done.

People love that one.

And one of the things that Rob,

one of the reasons people love it

is because turns out the kind of fun-loving

skater guy from MTV, like turns out he's like

an absolute nut when it comes to personal productivity

and like personal efficiency.

His quote on there was, I am human optimization.

And one of the things he had said was

that he writes his wife a handwritten note every day.

And so this guy wrote this blog post.

It was like the top post on hacker news over the weekend.

And it's called, write a note to your spouse every day.

A note a day keeps the divorce attorney away.

And he goes, I was listening to my first million

and Rob Dierdek was on there and he says

that he writes a note to his wife every day

because sometimes otherwise she would be the last person

to hear from him at the end of the day

about what he was working on, how he was feeling.

And he was usually tired by then

and wasn't really giving it his A plus.

So he goes, for the last six months,

I wrote a note to my wife every single day.

He goes, all right, that's a lie.

I did it most days, but like whatever, here's how it went.

And he goes, it's amazing.

Like we're on the same page about like

what's going on in our lives, our kids, our finances,

how we're spending our time.

We talk more than ever now.

You know, we have more trust, we feel less stressed,

we're less aggravated with each other.

And like we're better parents

because we're kind of like more in communication

with ourselves about parenting.

And he goes, you know, here's why, writing is thinking.

So just writing helped me clear my mind.

It wasn't just me dumping my thoughts onto her,

it was me like getting my own mind clear.

And he gives this outline, he goes, here's what I write.

First I write gratitude, like something about her,

you know, for her, for how hard she works,

for her looks, whatever.

Then what I'm working on today

and like my goals or my deadlines,

anything I'm excited about, anything that's bothering me,

any ideas I have, just like random ideas on my head

about parenting or fixing stuff around the house,

transactional stuff like, oh, we need to remember

to do this, we have to do this, don't forget that.

Questions like, hey, are we going to that thing?

Or hey, do we ever book that?

You know, hey, do we have an event coming up?

And lastly, again, gratitude for the life we have,

the things we have, the time we have,

the kids we have, et cetera.

Because I don't do all these sections every day,

but those are the general categories of things

I try to write.

It takes me just about 30 minutes if I'm not distracted.

And you know, it's been a huge like win for me.

And then he did this YouTube video with his wife,

like where they both like talked about afterwards

because the post blew up on hacker news,

he got like probably, you know, 100,000 views

or something like that.

So then they like did an interview together,

like talking about this little habit.

Pretty cool, right?

Yeah, this is awesome.

I just DMed him while you were talking, saying,

this is amazing.

And this is a really good headline.

Write a note to your spouse every day.

A note a day keeps a divorce attorney away.

This is a really good title.

This is a beautiful find.

I think, I guess I'll start doing this, right?

You know, probably.

Dude, it worked for Rob.

I mean, Rob is like successful.

Have you seen his wife?

I mean, she's very beautiful.

I'm pretty sure she was like a playmate,

like a, like a, I don't know what the word is,

playboy model or something.

I mean, she's like pretty, she's pretty amazing.

Oh yeah, I'm definitely doing this now.

Yeah, I guess I'll do that.

Why did this guy write so many words?

Put a picture of him to be done.

Well, anyhow, it's like, if you Google,

here's one of the ways that I knew that Rob was like

crazy rich.

If you Google Rob Deirdic home,

there's like 13 different articles.

And it's like all about like a different $10 million house.

Did you mean homes?

Did you mean mansions?

Yeah, and he buys all these houses

and he seems happy.

He's got his act together.

So yeah, I'm on board.

I guess, I guess I'll do this.

Fine.

All right, Rob.

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 a road.

Let's travel, never looking back.

Bye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.