So there's this book that I've been meaning to read it to my,

to read list, and it's called bullshit jobs.

And so it's this premise that, like,

I think it was a professor, some guy from school and economics of London or something like that. And his whole, like, I I I'm again, this from memory. I didn't research this much.

The his whole idea here is that most jobs out there in the world, like at least in white color world,

like, it's it's just kind of unnecessary. Like, and and to summarize it is, like, take a company like HubSpot, Amazon, Twitter, like,

what would happen if you, like, laid off two thirds of the people? Like, would it would anything do we do we think anything would change other than the company would just make more profit And this guy says, in in most cases, yeah, it would actually it would it would run just fine. And most of the jobs that you have are just worthless.

And I I kind of agree with him. I I I I kind of agree. When I don't have knowledge of it other than just personal

experience, but I don't it does sound like it would And it's hard because there's no counterfactuals so you don't get to run the test and actually, you know, it's run you can't split test and and run run both versions and see which one ends up better.

But I I've had this inkling for a while when we were getting acquired.

And I we were getting acquired by Twitch and and as part of it, they're like, hey, you gotta, like, you know, basically, like, your whole team is gonna come in for a day of interviews that's gonna decide kinda like if we take your whole team or not. And I had to do my interview as well, and so I'm going in there and they're like, you know, the classic job interview question, job interview structure is like, I'll ask you, a bunch of questions for ninety five percent of it. And then the last five percent of it, I'm like, so do you have any questions for us? And then you're supposed to say something that's also just you showing off

to, like, you know,

show some other strength of yours, you know, in in a different way. And,

and I had one genuine question. I asked it to every single person, and they were kind of like

taken a back

slash.

They thought I was kind of a jerk.

Some people thought they reacted kind of well. Like, oh, that's refreshing. I don't know. I haven't really thought about it. But I could tell other people were slightly offended by my question. And my question was,

I would say how many people work at Twitch? And they would be like, they, you know, I think we're at eighteen hundred or two thousand people now.

I said,

And how many people do you think I forgot how I phrased it, but it was something like, how many people do you think twitch needs

to, hit its goals?

And I was like, how many people do you think should work here? Alright. That's how many people do work here. How many people do you think should work here?

And people were like and so I asked the CEO this question too, And he was he I give him credit because

he's someone who, like, prioritizes the truth over being right. Like, getting it right is way better than being right. But he's also, like, a kind of a fierce debater. So he's not just gonna, like, lay down and be like, oh, you know, yeah, you're right. I changed my opinion about things. Like, so he, like, He took the question. He didn't, like, I would say nine out of ten CEOs would get quite offended by this question because it basically implies you've mismanaged the company by bloating It's a great question. I would not be offended.

He was not offended either. And he was, like, he was, like, that's a good question. He's, like,

I think, like, twenty two hundred. So he's, like, yeah, I think we're a little short of what we need to hit his goal. And he's, like, And then he his take was basically, like,

you know, I'm not saying we have all the right people or the most talented people or that, like, there's not people here who are underutilized or just kind of you know, the fat. That wasn't really his point. It was like,

I think we can be this much, this ambitious. And to do that, we would need you know, like, twenty two hundred awesome people, like, working in unison.

I still think he was wrong. I think we I think, you know, the company kind of operated on a third advance, but I I would have followed up with a few questions. The first one would be, okay, but do you think that you need to hire twenty two hundred people? Because you know that only ten percent of them are going to be actually value add and you just have to hire the the rest in order to find that ten percent. And then I would say, And also, is it possible that you only that you think you need twenty two hundred because you really only need, like, twenty percent effort from all those people and that's what your expectation is? And then finally,

how much does redundancy come into play here? How much do people are you just paying them and you just don't want to mention to them, but you're paying them to sit on the bench And when the person next to them quits, they just are ready to roll. Right.

Yeah. I didn't I didn't follow-up that hardcore about it, but I think those are, you know, very, like, valid valid points. And also, you know, one thing I I kind of learned from him was like, let's take that redundancy one. Right? Sounds bad. Right? Sounds like, oh, man. You're paying a bunch of people to kind of do nothing. Just sit around. No. It's insurance. And he's, like, it hit that was exactly his take, which was, like,

I think it was on speed. I was complaining how slow we were going.

And he's like, speed. He's like, going slow sometimes a feature not a bug here. And he's like, or, like, innovation. I was like, oh, man, we're not really innovating everybody else's. Didn't say this outright, but I I, you know, I gathered this through our conversations, which is like,

there are some things we're gonna innovate on. But actually, the optimal strategy here is to let a bunch startups go out and try to innovate. And then if anything works, either buy them or or clone them, like, that is actually the best way for us to innovate. It's like the It's free.

We get way more experiments done by super caliber, you know, super hungry motivated people, like startup founders and their teams. Who are laser focused on just that one thing, and they'll try radical experiments that we would never otherwise do, and we don't have to fund it. But we can sit back and watch it. And then when we're ready, we can either go try to acquire them, partner with them. Or if they don't wanna do any either of those, we could build our own and just use our distribution and our brand

which, you know, we have a we have, you know, x millions of users,

then we should be able to out compete them from there. And, my issue with I think that's actually is the optimal strategy.

I agree with Emmett, I think, on most things. I I imagine I would hope But by the way, I should I should say I'm not putting words in my mouth. This, like, what I gathered from a bunch of a bunch of different conversations. I'm sure he would disagree with, like, you know, forty or fifty percent of what I just said, somewhat paraphrasing him poorly.

Yeah. And it's just like your opinion on your takeaway. My take of his takes.

And I, I think I would agree with oh, I bet I I would agree with a lot of of what he thinks. My issue is when you're like

a small company, like under fifty people,

you're all in it. A lot of times, you're in it for a mission. You're in it to achieve something. I think that you can get away with just being in it because people just like being in the thick of it with their friends.

Like they just like the action. When you get a little bit bigger, I think it's less mission oriented and you're and and it's just a job. But you still have to put on this face like this to inspire people. And it kinda sucks because the truth is is like, well, you know, I I know that, you know, a lot of you are only working forty percent, and that's okay. I'm okay with that. I baked that into this. I know that a lot of you aren't working at all, you're really just here in case the guy next to you quits, and then hopefully you're gonna train the next person. And I know that a lot of you wanna innovate and try these new things, but that's not really what we're gonna do. We're gonna keep doing the same shit just a better. And then maybe every once in a while, I'm gonna have a team that makes something totally new. And I know all this, but just tough. And figuring out how to navigate and but have that, like, to say what I just said, but in a really inspiring way, or

unfortunately, just lie. You gotta lie or

the best way. Yeah. Just act. You gotta just act and pretend,

and be a politician a little bit. I find that to be incredibly challenging, but I think it's incredibly area?

Yes. You you're you're spot on.

You're spot on with that. You are spot on with

with what you just said. Do you think you could do it?

You know, the I think the thing you said so you have you ever heard of Dunbar's number?

Yeah. What's it mean again? So Dunbar's number is basically it's a hundred fifty. That's the number. And it's meant to represent the number

of like, how many people you can know? Like, how many people do you are familiar? You you, like, know their name, their face. How many people can one person know? Actually, Right? Like, somebody's like, I got six thousand friends. Like, no. Well, you don't really know six thousand people. And so Dunbar's number was was used to be a hundred fifty. It's like, in a tribe, you could know a hundred up to a hundred fifty, you could know everybody in the tribe. Past to a hundred fifty, you don't know everybody in the tribe. And then tools like social media and stuff came out that kinda like it's like a tool for the human body to, like, do more. So it's like you might be able to know and keep up with more than a hundred fifty people

because Facebook makes it easy with the news feed and photos, and their name is listed there and whatever. You get to see it all the time.

I think what you're saying is, like, your version of Dunbar's number, which is fifty. And it's, like, below this dumb par's dumb par's number. I'll call it.

Below fifty

below fifty.

The people who are there are, like, you know, down for the cause. The -- Yeah. -- the the the the the larger prior. Obviously, they care about themselves, but, like,

a bigger, like, one of the top factors, either number one or number two can be, like, the cause. And then, like Or even just, like, just, like, you know, like, that kid who said he wants to do hood red stuff with his friends, like, that that could be the cause. Like, I just wanna I just it just

there's a viral video, like,

years ago, and they interviewed this, like, nine year old who,

stole his grandmother's car,

and crashed it. And the guy was like, why did you why did you steal her car? That's that was really bad of you. And he goes, He goes, I try to be good, but sometimes I just, like, doing hood rat stuff with my friends, like smoking cigarettes and driving cars. Play the video. Play the video, Pat. You gotta play that really quick. Can you play it? Along the way he ran over two mailboxes hit two parked cars in a Costco parking lot and struck two moving cars near Walmart I wanna do it because it's fun, funny do bad things,

drive into a car. Well, did you know that you could perhaps kill somebody? Yes, but I wanted to do hill rest stuff with my friend. Personal. That's how I feel about startups. The YouTube feature for this podcast just took us to a whole new level already. First one is great.

Second, we need to pull the clip.

Yeah, just sometimes I wonder who could resonate with the friends. And that needs to be a sound clip then that you can just play when Meared Sandris talking about something dumb that we're doing. So just just go ahead and cut that one out. That that's the best part about that's the best part about startups. Like, I don't care if it's ad tech. I don't care if I'm selling clothing. I don't care. Like, it feels like

when you're when you're like pulling shit off and you're like kinda fit into people and like, yeah, you know, we've been you know, we really care about our customers. Our team is it's like just three of you and, you know, it's like you're just like trying to pretend that you're a big deal. Like, that's hood rat shit and I love doing that with my friends. But I wanted to do her stuff with my friend. By the way, have you struggled to do that?

At now that you're big enterprise,

you know, SaaS company that's, like, worth billions of dollars and

Hood Rathead is now frowned upon. And you're like, I just yanked it. I yanked it.

You can't and they're like, you just yanked it, Sam? Why did you do that? We have a process for that.

Because I definitely could think of, like, two or three examples where I was bragging about something I did that was, like, the startup scrappy thing, which Well, I would just be like, yeah. Like, you know,

like, for for example, there was, like, a competitor.

And

I, like, went met I, like, talked to the founder, and I was, like, yeah. Like, you know, I basically found out a bunch of their numbers. And I was like, oh, yeah. You know, they're going this fast, this other doing blah blah blah. And they're like, well, how do you know that? And I was like, talked to him. I told him I was in in straight and blah blah blah. And they're like, oh,

I was like, what? And they're like, Well, you know, we just usually, we don't we don't do a hoodwretch. Sean. Okay. Basically, it's like, the the reward I thought I was creating was like, well, we're gonna need to talk to legal and also corp dev is gonna have to, you know, we have a guy whose job is to have those conversations and we We typically sign a lot of engagement before, you know, it was, like, whatever. It was, like, not the exact example, but, like, things that in the startup, when I was doing my startup, I would be proud of my hack about, like, whatever or, like, I remember once I was negotiating a partnership deal.

And, like, basically, I was just, like, really negotiating for, like, every, like, every which as a startup, I used to love

winning a deal, like, doing it, like, getting a good deal for ourselves.

And,

And they were just like, you know, they're like, you know what? Like, we'd rather just use our standard deal, and it's more favorable for him. So he'll be happy. And, we don't have to, like, you know,

let you, like, negotiate deal by deal on these things. And, like, you know, in general, we don't really want you negotiating directly with the person. We have, like, partnerships with people who do that. You're

like the big lebowski guy. It's like, dude, do you need a toe? I'll get you a toe.

I can I'll get you a toe if you need a toe.