I mean, how many times have as as someone proposed something? Everyone's like, yeah, I don't get it. But then someone else is like, look, what this is really about is blah blah blah. Everyone's like, oh, that sounds great. Bad I want. What you just said, you know, it's not bad information. It's bad presentation. I made my whole career doing that.

Alright, Jason. We're live. This how we start. We we just jump right into it. Can I give

the can I give my, like, brag about you intro of what I know about you and then you can kinda correct anything that I get wrong? Of course. We have Jason Cohen. So Jason Cohen originally started. You had a bunch of smaller businesses, but in the early two thousands, you started

Was it called, it just called smart bear or smarter bear? Just smart bear. That was twenty two years ago. Believe it or not. Smart bear. So twenty two years ago, you started smart bear. You grew it for, like, seven years, bootstrapped it, making millions of dollars in profit, sold it. That company now has a thousand plus employees, has sold recently or traded recently for, like, two billion. Is that right? Yeah. It actually doesn't have that many employees. It's more like hundreds, which is part of why it's impressive because it's Yeah. It was sold in twenty twenty for two billion, and it doesn't have a thousand employees. It's super profitable.

Like,

it was publicly said then, what the profits were. It's fifty percent bottom line profit.

God. So just just a, a printing, a cash pretty machine, then you start a WP engine of which I'm a customer of, WP engines, one of the largest web hosting companies in the world.

That company you bootstrap for two or three years, then you now you've raised, I think or three hundred million dollars, it makes many hundreds of millions of dollars as worth billions of dollars. And all along the way, you've been blogging.

At, a smart bear dot com. I've been reading that for years. You are not the loudest person. And that's the reason why I wanted to have you on is because you're not the loudest person. But anyone who's, like, in the thick of it and trying to build great companies,

everyone reads your blog. Like, the the the the the one percent, the one percent read your blog. You've got a really good audience of people actually building it. And the reason I like you is you and Dharmesh are a little bit of the same personality to me. There's, like, this Venn diagram, and it's, like,

it's, like, people who are wildly successful. Like, we're talking billionaire successful.

But then also our

just do shit just because it's fun. And at the same time, have this weird, like, logical

way of thinking, but then can, like, disregard that logical way of thinking and just do what cool and what's exciting, which is really rare to have someone who's both an engineer, but also understands, like, fuck it. I'm just gonna do it because this is cool. And you do that. So, like,

Chunt, he just dm ed me on Twitter. And I was like, dude, I just got this automated DM from you. He's like, oh, yeah. I built this script that automatically dm's everyone who follows me on Twitter. He's that type of guy where, like, he's got, like, a thousand projects that he would never even talk about, but it's, like, a little thing that he had to get on the weekend. But you also have WPNJib, which is this massive unicorn.

And so that's why we wanted to have you on the podcast. Well, yeah. I mean, WP engines are, like, one of the top ten web platforms in the world. And then you're also tinkering with, like, these DM, auto DM scripts like, yeah. This is useful. I like this. And so that's the that combo we've we've come to find is a really good fit with us on the pod. Somebody who as ambition at scale, but also as a tinkerer at heart. I wanna talk to you about some different ideas. So check this out, Sean, on your computer, Jason, if you have a computer to do this too, go to zek

dot app. So it's the word deck, but with the z. So z e c k dot app.

Okay. So it says, Zack's reimagine how CEOs collaborate with her board. You score down. Who's face is that? Yeah.

It it did and Norton.

And Norton, the actor,

is the founder of this company. That's funny. He's I believe he's, like, if you Google, like, this company, Zack, and you see, like, them doing presentations on CNBC and shit like that, he's talking. He's the founder of this company.

Dude, I just booked a demo call in forty five minutes just in case it's Ed Norton who's gonna I just might get a free call with Ed Norton. This might be great. If it's not Ed Norton, I'm immediately hanging up to Zoom.

I saw an interview with him and he said he's super active, but these guys are they're like, I guess Ed Norton's father, I think, was, like, business person.

And he was raised around business. And he, he was I saw him give this interview, and he was like, yeah. The thing about when I work with all these companies I invest in is they're horrible at telling me story. They're horrible at giving a presentation. And I so I just I wanted to create software that would just help them be better at that at telling the story explaining how the company is going and to make our meetings more productive and to teach them how to do presentation.

And I think this company, I don't know if software yet. I think it's still a service. I'm not I'm not entirely sure.

But I I saw this site and I was like, the fuck is Ed Norton doing on this little, like, software site, but Ed Norton is this is his company doing it. And, you know, it's not just the experience of the viewer.

And and just wanting people's time to not be wasted, which it also is that. But it's also more compelling. Like, if you're trying to propose something, if you do a better job, it's more likely that it'll happen. I mean, how many times have has has someone proposed something? Everyone's like, I don't get it. But then someone else is like, look, what this is really about is blah blah blah. Everyone's like, oh, that sounds great.

That I want. What you just said, you know, like, what? I mean, that's just bad presentation. It's not bad information. It's bad presentation. I made my whole career doing that.

Well, yeah. We have, like, we have these college we have these college kids come on one once a year, twice a year, and they, like, pitch their company. And Sean's very good at hearing what they said. He goes, That's actually a great idea. You're you've explained it horribly. Here's how I would retell that, and you will tell this beautiful story. And then everyone's jaw is dropping. And we're like, yeah. We're in. And, he does that all the time. He's very good at that. Yeah. We've done pitch competitions as at Capitol Factory for

fifteen or sixteen years, and it always goes like that. So can a n magically fix it all? I don't know about that. But, like, could it could it get go from, like, negative ten to at least, like, a two out of ten? You know, maybe. Well, I think you said three I I thought of three interesting things while you were talking. And I think you you prompted three really interesting ideas. The first is

you're right that most decks are terrible, and they're not and and everybody attacks us from a how do we make the slides fancy here? Prezi's like, hey. What if you were hang gliding while you were looking at the slide deck? Because, like, no. No. Prezi chill out. It's not that's not what we need. And other people pitch is like, you know what? What if a designer just designed everything? It's like cool, but the actual message is the the part that's out of order jumbled up and unclear,

it's foggy, and that's why this deck is no good, not because the background color needs to be soft pastel pink. And so you you start to look at this One thing that I've done is,

whenever somebody on my team makes a presentation,

I inevitably will try to, like, try to make it better. And the easiest way to make it better is just to ask a couple of questions. Right? Like, a couple of simple questions. One is, like, if people are gonna remember one thing from this presentation, what should it be? What's what is the number one way. Oh, it's this thing on slide thirty seven. Cool. Let's make that slide one. And then that thing you want them to take away, let's make that the title. Right? Like, that that'll be the title of that slide. And you just sort of go on, you know, you ask, like, five questions, and you can make your presentation much better with five questions.

I've also started using AI in this way. So instead of going to AI and basically go to chat GPU, instead of asking a question and getting an answer, which I think is how most people use it, I'll go to chat GPU, and I basically say, I'm trying to do x,

but I'm not sure where to start. What are some questions? Like, ask me some questions so that I could start thinking about this the right way. It'd be like, well, it seemed like, you know, we did this when we we did an episode where we were picking us we did a fake, like, stock up a loser. We're picking a stock. It's like pick one stock. They, you know, just like for fun. Like, we're all horrible stock pickers, but let's do it just for fun. And I went and I I wrote that. I said, how should I be thinking about this? Like, well, If you're picking a stock, what you wanna do is this. Right? And you you might wanna ask yourself the following questions. What's an area I really know about? What's a thing that I really believe in? Am I looking for something short term or long term? Right? And it asked me a bunch of questions that made me get more clear. And I think if AI was gonna do anything, it would what I wouldn't do is just take my input and make it better. It would actually start stop me before I even vomit, and it would just say, cool. Let's just establish a couple of, you know, How long is this supposed to be? Absolutely. Getting getting interviewed and and getting interviewed by, it makes a lot of sense, especially if it has some context of what you're saying. And so the the questions can be even more pointed Another thing I've heard once, which I really like, I haven't used this a lot, but it's it's neat, which is

one thing that AI is good at right now is just giving you the bland neutral summary of the topic. Right. It definitely can do that.

So if you ask it for the bland neutral summary of the topic, it will tell you the most obvious boring stuff. So that's what you don't say. It's like a negative space. So, like, well, this isn't interesting.

Anything that's not this might be interesting. Now maybe that's on you to think of what that is, but maybe there's some, like, multi step process where the AI could be like, Okay. I heard all their crap. Now I'm gonna go ask myself what the the the then I'm gonna go try to find the stuff that they said that's not in there. Then I'm gonna try to enhance that. Then I'm gonna try to Like, maybe a multi step here. I could do that. Maybe not, again, that there's a lot of maybes and could haves. I know. But if it were obvious and easy, wouldn't be a good startup idea. This has to be something a good startup idea has to be somewhat difficult, to pull off. Yeah. So you have a little learning start. Anyway, that's interesting. And then the the second thing is you said about titles. That's a huge pet peeve of mine. I I agree completely.

People will say,

they'll they'll use the title to label what is on the page, which isn't usually not useful because I can see what's on the page. It should be the message you wanted to take from that one slide. That should be the title. So it shouldn't say our team. I can see it's our team because there's three heads in their stuff. It's just say something like, you know, our team has had three successful exits or our team has to collect, you know, collective thirty years experience is the most boring thing you could say, but at least it's something. You know? Like, what is it that you want me to know about the team that's so special? That's what's in the title. Again, AI could prompt or even force that.

And it also then helps your it it goes the other way too. Now it helps your narrative.

Oh, yeah. So I should put on the screen where we all went to college and stuff. I shouldn't read that. I should talk about the title which says we've had two exits. So I should say, yeah, we exited this thing in this space, this thing in that space, and we work together there. We've been to the trenches. That's why this this team is totally derisked in terms of people,

which you don't see every day. So we have plenty of risks, but the team's not one of them. Whoa. That's a good that's a good thing to say on a team slide to an investor. Investors is like, okay, tick. Like, I I don't quite believe you that there's no risk, but, like, with you. I'm with you. This isn't when I'm gonna lose sleep over it. I love that.

You know, that should be the title. So, like, AI could help and echoes both ways, in do it. And if you don't have good titles, you could say, what should what do you really wanna say here? Oh, let's make a title this long. Okay. Now let's go back to the text. This is something you could be prompted for. Any presentation is improved if you do that. Alright. I want a quick break to tell you about HubSpot and this one's easy because I'm gonna show you an example of how I'm doing this at my When I say I, I mean, not my team. I mean, I'm the one who actually made this. So I've got this company called Hampton. You could check it out join hampton dot com. It's a community for founders. And one of the ways that we've grown is we've created these surveys, but we'll ask our members certain questions that a lot of people a lot of times people are afraid to ask. So things like what their net worth is, how their assets are allocated, all these, like, interesting questions, and then we'll put it in a survey, and I went and made a landing So you can check it out at join hampton dot com slash wealth. You can actually see the landing page that I made. And the hard part with this is with Hampton, we are appealing to a sort of a higher end customers sort of like like a Louis Vuitton or a Ferrari. So I needed the landing page to look a very particular way. HubSpot has templates That's what we use. We just change the colors a little bit to match our brand very easy. They have this drag and drop version of their landing page builder, and it's super simple. I'm not tech and I'm the one who actually made it. And once it's made, I then shared it on social media, and we have thousands of people see it and thousands of people who gave us their information And I can then see over the next handful of weeks, this is how much revenue came in from this wealth survey that I did. This is where the revenue came from. It came from Twitter. It came from LinkedIn. Whatever it came from, I can actually go and look at it, and I can say, oh, well, that worked. That didn't work. Do more of that. Do less of that. If you're interested in making landing pages like this, I highly suggest it. Look, I'm actually doing it, but you could check it out. Go to the link in the description of YouTube and get started. Alright. Now back to MFM.

Here's what's funny is that, you know, I have no idea if you are, but you you might be a billionaire

or you're in that realm and you've started multi billion dollar companies,

we asked you about ideas.

The idea that you spent most on is on how you manage Twitter.

I find that to be hilarious. Yes. Give us the second idea. Your your your Twitter social media management tool idea.

Yeah. Well, it's not just Twitter. Like, part of what's neat about it is, I the same tool does LinkedIn and,

and, mastodon, which isn't isn't really working, but okay. Here's some stuff I think is is special. And and also other people could just do this even manually if you want.

So one is,

there's certain people that I, that I want to have more interactions with. So I have them in a Twitter list because then you can search for it. Right? But I do a search where it's the first people on that list, and they've posted in the last twenty minutes,

which is a pretty small window.

And there might be a couple of things, like, they have some favorites or I don't know if some whatever. Okay.

And I'll look at that and sometimes there's nothing in it, sometimes just one or two.

But I'll try to if it's relevant to me, then I'll respond somehow.

And because it was just it just got posted, it's much more likely that they will respond or see it.

Also, if it's a good comment, like, if I spend time making it really good,

then their followers who might see this over the course of the next ten hours,

They may see my comment and upload it. I may be one of those comments near the top that ends up with a lot of likes and maybe some follows. I've seen times right at the follow-up because of a reply to someone with a lot of other followers. Right?

By doing it early, I get that.

So

if I just scanned everybody, it that time frame is important.

So it really focuses my attention on that. So I spend almost no time on this, and yet I have this big, oh, outsized impact of what those what those are, whether I'm talking to that person or the replies.

So that's something you can just take. Like, my system does that, but you can just take that. The other effect that has, which is funny is people are like, dude, you're always online. Like, I saw Dara Mesh post and, like, bam, you were there, like, in two minutes. What they don't know is yeah. But I see, like, one fiftieth of what Danish posts. It's just whatever it happens to be exactly what he posted, I'll see it. So you your perception is, quote, unquote, I'm always online, but the fact is No. It's this trick. And so it's like a really funny trick that that has that effect.

Why do you care? Why do you care? Because you you you had you had this one thing

Well, no. I I asked that because you wrote this other thing that I totally agree with. So, let me let let me say it this way. I have a bunch of buddies that are very successful.

You have no idea who they are.

They'll see me get popular on Twitter, and they go, hey, Sam, can you, can you help me write some tweets? And I'm like, Did why? Who gives a shit? Like, you you're winning. Do who cares about this? He goes, I don't know. It seems fun. So I so I help him write some stuff. And every once in a while, it'll go viral and they get popular, whatever. And they get addicted to it. And I'm like, dude, don't get addicted to this. You're get addicted to the thing you're already doing. That's way better. Yeah. Yeah. And you had you have this poster. It was a sentence somewhere in one of your blog posts where you're like,

I actually think that people who have audiences that then launch software products to those audiences, I think that's really dumb because they're actually not get that. They're not gonna get that many customers. That doesn't work. But that's not why I'm doing it. I'm not I'm not launching another product because of social media. Okay. So then why do you care some I mean, when I followed you. I got an automated DM from you. You told me that you built something to do that. Why do you care about building something like this for social media? Just strictly for fun. Now what I have done for even longer than wp engine is right. And so that is, at this point, just a part of who I am, and I get a lot of fulfillment out of it. And said, you're like, wow. There's a lot of good stuff here.

Every time I hear that, it feels good. And also, it's really just the craft of it. Like, I like to try to get the thoughts that I have as

clear as possible or as interesting as possible, but there's so much that gets triggered that way. That's useful to me and fun for me too. And Sam sent me this blog post that you wrote that I loved, and I think it's called

Richverse King. And this is great because we talk about money, and we are honest about the fact that many people get into entrepreneurship because they wanna make a bunch of money, and that's okay. You don't have you don't have to protect. You don't have to, like, lie about that part, which is a, I think, is is common, unfortunately.

But you also

built bootstrap companies that enabled a great lifestyle for you and your employees. And so I'm curious,

can you explain for people who haven't read the Rich First King Post? What is the premise of this post and then how it's played out for you? I think the key thing that people really like out of it is this, two box problem that I put near the end that was my final decision of why to sell Smart Bear, which is Let's say there's two boxes in front of you, and let's say if you are wealthy, suppose try to remember when you weren't.

In one box, there's ten million dollars.

Like period. That's what's in the box. In the second box, which is opaque,

there's either twenty million dollars or nothing.

And

let's just say it's a fifty fifty chance

of which one it is. And the question is which box do you want? You have to pick just one. Which one do you want?

Well, if you don't have money yet, I mean, almost everyone's gonna pick the ten million for sure because it changes your life

permanently.

Now you could argue, you know, what kind of lifestyle, blah, blah, blah, but, like, that's a life changing amount of money. Whereas the other one is even more money, but it's actually not that much more life changing, and there's a good chance that you won't get it at all. That's silly.

This is why when you get offered some money to sell the company, it's often a good idea to take it. Of course, it could be big in the future, but if you haven't crossed over to this life changing out of money yet, what I was in that post called the Freedom line, You could argue how free, how much money. Okay. But when you cross over some sort of line, which maybe you should decide for yourself,

it's re it's awfully hard not to take it. Now what's interesting with the box game is if you're a statistician or you're an economist, what you would say is there's no difference between the two boxes. Because the expected value of both box is ten million. So they're the same. And my point is, no. They're not.

Expected value is not the right way to evaluate the situation.

Furthermore, in real life, I said that one box was fifty fifty, and real life don't know what the probabilities are.

What's the chance the company will grow and sell and be huge? What's the chance to stagnant and it doesn't sell? What's the chance that it goes to zero? Like, nobody knows. So it's worse than that. It's uncertainty, meaning I don't even know what the probabilities are much less risky, which means I do know what the probabilities are. So it's actually far worse. So I know that, you know, yeah, some people might take the other box. It's okay. You can do whatever you want, obviously. But most people will take that sure thing. When it's real money. Now if it's ten dollars versus twenty dollars, you know, whatever, you might as well take a flyer in twenty because who cares. So the magnitudes

relative to your net worth all matter which I didn't really talk about there in that post because I wasn't getting into that. But that's also true. It it is it changing something substantially for you or not? Is actually a critical question?

You're a great writer. And there's two or three great sentences that I like out of this post. It was,

you're very bluntly you say, I was always in it for the money. Especially in the form of an acquisition.

I would tell everyone here we're here to make money, and if someone offers it by the company someday, I'm gonna sell it. And then you said after you sold that you go, I have the freedom to work on any project I want for the rest of my life while simultaneously providing for my family. Never again worrying about bills, debt, having a place to sleep or setting my daughter to any college she wants.

And I

particularly the I was always in it for the money. I think that's just great to just be very clear in knowing exactly what you want, in that post. I thought that I thought that was beautiful how you said that. Also, it's not incompatible with things like I want our customers to be happy. I want our employees to also make that much money blah blah blah. Like, it's not incompatible with other positive things that you wanna do. There's a big difference between I wanna make money and do ethical things

and create product that actually have value, or not just, middlemen or something like that or arbitrage,

you can say both. In fact, you probably should.

So you wrote that post in o nine, I think, originally,

and you have this cool graph where you show, like, there's, like, a threshold of that matters.

In two thousand twenty three, twenty four, what's that threshold do you think now and what do you think it was then? Well, what's interesting is,

I it's this is not relative.

So at this point, it's it's a WP engine. Also, we've had a few secondary rounds, which by the way, all employees got to participate,

in as well.

And so now I have enough money that, I don't have a line anymore.

Like, it's okay if I don't make any more money ever again. I really don't care.

You know, I I don't care, like, oh, can I get a a jet or not? It's not interesting to me. Just this is personal. Right? Everyone's different when it comes to money or what they want, lifestyle.

I have a lifestyle that I want. I don't need more money.

So there's no line. Like, I just don't that that's not what's motivating or what will make a decision for me anymore.

Well, what about Jason Cohen and

o six when you sold?

Like, was there what was the number where you were like? Anything above is gravy? Oh. And

that's that's a threshold for me. I think then I was thinking,

like, ten million.

I think I think nowadays, it's it's much more clear that you need something like twenty million. This is all in the US, by the way. To have what would be considered to be like a rich lifestyle in America?

Because okay. You know, people say things like,

Well, I only spend, you know, eighty to a hundred k a year right now. So if I had ten million, I I could live off of that, and you'd be right.

But that's not how people are. Mean, I'm not very materialistic, and even I wouldn't wanna do that. Oh, I'm gonna continue to live at that rate forever.

Isn't usually what people wanna do. It could be. Again, if that's you, then that's that's That's awesome. Perfect. You know what to do. That's not really what happens.

So

probably more like twenty million because you have to you have to there's a lot of things to do, but you have to think about

averages and having a portfolio that's balanced and then taxes and then inflation. And so even four percent of of interest taking out per year is actually kind of a lot given that you wanna maintain it and to keep up with inflation, etcetera. And that's where the twenty million sometimes comes from is is, you know, four percent of that is, like, a little under a mill a million after tax. And then you can have quite, but what you what anyone in America would consider a rich lifestyle.

I'm happy that you put a number on it. One thing that I think is cool. We should put this chart up are the graph on on our YouTube channel. So, basically, it's like there's, like, the levels. He's, like, you can't afford to lose your job. You know, at at some point, you're at that level where losing your job would be detrimental to you. Okay. Then you can owner in house, then you can, and he wrote, never look at the right side of a menu. Alright. So you only look at the dish. You don't look at the price.

Never have to work again. And then it's, like, private jet. And you could see that, like, it's asymptomatic. The the the value of the cash is, you know, definitely flattening out the further you go. And so you draw that line And that the freedom line, basically, if, like, you never have to work it again, you could have total total control over your time as, like, the important threshold. Yeah. But see, so much also depends on things like I mean, if you're twenty six and you get this offer,

and you know you do wanna work. Like, you don't wanna not work again. That's not what you're gonna do. You're gonna do something. So it's like, alright. I don't need to never work again, quote, unquote. What I would like to but but let's say you're burned out. It's been six or seven years. You just wanna do something else. And so,

well, you know, you do take a ton of money off the table, then you can invest a couple million into your next venture while still keeping a couple million in the bank. And so, no, you couldn't live off that for this. You're like, but you don't wanna live off that for this. You're like, you want enough to sell fun something and do the next thing. And so I mean, you have to look at the goals of course that are in front of you.

But certainly, you don't wanna adopt other people's goals. I mean, I think that's maybe the unspoken

other message of the post is what is it that you want? And how do you know that? And how do you get that? And if someone else says like, no, you should you should build a unicorn. Like, it doesn't matter what anybody else says. Yep. Play your game. So, you know, your blog is basically like a a gold mine of startup wisdom. And I was mining it last night when I was doing my research for this, going back through reading some of the stuff that I liked, There was a few things I had never read that I actually really, really liked. I wanted to read a couple of these, get you to react to them because

you had some

like, kind of just nugget small small short things that I want you to elaborate a little bit on or maybe give an example about just to make it real for people.

Because they've they rang true to me. So here's one.

You said all startups are screwed up, including the ones that work. It's just that the ones at work have one or two things that they're excellent at, even though they screwed up a bunch of things that didn't, it didn't kill them. They didn't die.

So explain this because I think people have a perception of My business is kinda screwed up. That's maybe why I'm failing. The ones that work,

it's all working. It's all good. It's, you know, that there's something different. That's right. Explain that one.

Yeah. It makes sense that that's our perception. Number one, because we all have, like, some form of imposter syndrome of, like, somehow everyone else has their shit figured out. We don't.

Which, of course, isn't true, but it makes sense that we all kinda feel that way.

The other thing is we see every problem in our business And we only dwell on the problems. Like, the things that are going well, we're not spending time on those things because that's not what needs attention needs fixing.

So, you know, we're spending ninety percent of our time on all the problems of which there are many.

So we feel like we're just drowning in bad things, which we are. That's the truth.

Then you look at a competitor or whatever, somebody on TechCrunch, and what are you seeing? Some weird, varnished outside, not true version of it, where they're super confident and everything's fine, Bola. The the way I like to say it is,

whenever you see a company, kind of, like, immediately went a business, go look at what they posted on their blog the previous week, and go look at the last podcast they did. I promise you it was a hundred percent optimism. Everything's going well. We're growing like crazy. We're getting profitable. We're hiring. People are loving. I guarantee it's all that.

The week before they went bankrupt.

That just proves that it's bullshit. Now that doesn't mean everyone's failing or everyone's not failing. It just proves that what you're seeing is definitely not the truth. But you are seeing your truth and dwelling on the bat. So this disparity

makes sense. But once you so so it's logical, once you know that you're like, okay. So it's not like every it's not true that everyone's public persona is is the true Then the other thing you can do is read the more honest accounts of businesses like Twitter or, you know, Facebook and stuff when they were coming up. And it's just rule of shit. They could just roll us down a little bit. But what do you see in those things? Not that you should be like Facebook. I'm not saying that. But just as an interesting factor,

But what is it about them? It's like, well, here's this thing. There was something about connecting people

at oncologists

with the faces and the whatever that was just So correct, so good. What we might say now had such good product market fit that despite all of the other problems, it was a raging success.

At Twitter, like this idea that you're posting just the headline of your blog post.

Why was that so perfect? I don't know. Maybe no one does. People have theories. It doesn't matter. The point is it was so compelling

that

all those other problems just I mean, there was a fail will for years. For years, they couldn't keep the site up.

Something about it. Again, I maybe I can't put my finger on it, but something about it was so compelling. They just see they succeeded despite this obvious

public,

massive year, multi year failures.

Yep. So that's what I mean by, like, okay. So everything's screwed up. Okay. Different ways. Different levels screwed up. Sure. But everything's screwed up. And

if there's those one or two things that are just so compelling whether it's delighting people or so useful or it's built into their workflow. There's various reasons why something might be just so good. And I have thoughts on that as well, of course.

Then,

then it it you succeed despite those problems. It doesn't mean these problems are like okay and you shouldn't attack them, but it does mean a few things that are very useful. One, emotionally. Like, get over it. It's okay. Everyone else is screwed too. Two,

you're not gonna fix everything and you don't have to.

Because success stories besides like Facebook blah blah, but even bootstrap solo companies.

That person also does not fix every problem they have. Of course, how could they? There's just not enough hours in the day. So you don't have to fix every problem. Oh,

that's a relief.

Then it begs the question. Which couple of problems only

should I be fixing right now that really are holding me back that really might lead me to go out of business that really is hindering my growth the most. That's really why people are canceling the most. You know, these these are example things that might be that critical problem or two. Identifying that by answering questions like those, that's what you should do. And you should be seeking with that one or two, you know, critical things are That's the reason people don't cancel despite that crap. The reason people sign up the fight, the reason they advocate for you on Twitter review sites. What are they saying in there? That's so freaking good. Because whatever that is, you need every every customer to experience that thing. Like, maybe you can change your processes or your soft your features or the onboarding process, whatever. So that more people experience that amazing thing, whatever it is. So identifying as one to three key things, the one to three problems, that's what you gotta do. Then

That's where you focus your time, whether you're a solopreneur, or whether you're WPS and you have, twelve hundred people, those are the few things you focus on on. You know, how do I remove some of those barriers that I actually should? How do I enhance these things that are the thing that's making it work?

And then all the rest of it, you don't wanna ignore.

You wanna do it. You see it. But you must just for capacity.

And, actually, it's okay that you are. And I and, again, I gave you lots of examples of why it is okay in fact that you are. So that's what to do about that.

Dude, I remember I used to host these events, and I would I would get the we'd have all these speakers come, and they were founders of every startup you've heard And I would hang out with him in the green room with about six of them at a time, and it was nothing but complaining in fear.

And I remember we had this guy named Alex. Alex started this company called the athletic. You guys know the athletic. It's like a, subscription sports blog or media company.

They, and eventually sold to your times for hundreds of millions of dollars. I was with him, I think, on a Friday, and that Wednesday, the Wednesday before,

They just released an article saying they'd raised a hundred million dollars in funding. Everything was going great, or and they had this beautiful photoshoot.

And he was a ball of stress

And I think he he was just kind of,

venting a little bit to me of saying everything that was going wrong, how he's so frustrated with this and that. And I remember thinking, like, you're in the New York Times, like, on Wednesday, and he had this beautiful photo shoot. Like, sounds like everything was going great. And he was just it was just

the reality was it things were going mostly great. Obviously, he turned out alright, but he was just complaining so much to me because I was just kind of a sounding board for him. And I remember, like, thinking after all of these events that I've hosted was my major takeaway, which is that the people I admire,

they were shit shows just like I was. And that was, like, kind of a game changing

kind of

mind altering

belief that that happened during those events. I gotta be careful. I gotta be careful asking. How's it going?

You never know what you

don't ask. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I was like, how are you, man? It was like, just bitching, talk constantly and and And I also, like, I, like, egg I gotta give these guys respect. I was egging them on. It's not like they ever just, like, bitching the bitch. I was egging them on. Something does change with scale. So

Before product market fit, it's obviously, you don't know what you're doing yet. That's the whole point. And then you do, and you're starting to scale up if you do.

Then it's just all it should show all of it because everything's growing and weird and no one knows what to do. And and the things that got you to product markets that are the wrong actions to take when you scale. You're like, all I'm doing is experimenting. Not when you scale, you know what to do. Now you need to do more of it. You need specialists in it. You so it's a totally different behavior. It becomes more like,

like a tumultuous

the ocean kind of thing where it's like some things are riding high and and fine and and some things are not, but it's not true that, like, a hundred percent of things are broken. It's just not true anymore because we've had the time and the people and and blah blah blah to build up that. And you need to. Like, as you scale up, you need it needs to not be a food fight forever.

Like, it has to mature into something because you can't you can't operate like you were just saying with a thousand people. That's just complete chaos. So that's that it can't be. You you had a good quote from, the guy from Box, Aaron Levy. He he said,

he goes, so starting up is the act of doing as many jobs as possible to make sure your company doesn't die. And then scaling up is the act of shedding as many jobs as possible to make sure your company doesn't die to make sure it survives. Right? Yep. I think that's, that's very true. You know, another thing that Aaron Levy specifically said is,

At any given time, half of the company isn't working, I just don't know which half. Right. Dude, Aaron Levy doesn't get nearly enough

clout, I think, as he should. So for those listening, Aaron Levy started box. It's box dot com. He started box, which is a it's like very similar to Dropbox by Enterprise.

He started that company when he was, like, eighteen or, was he eighteen? Was he that young? Like, he was just out of high school, I think. And he it's now a publicly traded company, and he's still the CEO. He's been doing this now for fifteen plus years, maybe.

That guy does not get nearly enough credit. That guy's demand. We should have that guy on. Yeah, Aaron. You're welcome on. I have a few few other spicy takes. I wanna get your get your reaction here because I was, like, reading this up. Yeah. I've been guilty of that. Because a lot of your advice, even though WPN is this huge company, and you could talk about, like, scaling this big thing. A lot of the stuff that resonated with me was the early stuff. Like, the I don't have product market fit just pulling me yet.

You said when you

most founders were doing customer discovery over,

like, that early stage research about an idea. You go, it's just a founder who's in love with their idea,

essentially doing, like, fake sales calls. Like, just looking for evidence to support their belief.

I've definitely done that. I'm sure Sam We all have. That's why it rings true because, of course, we all have done that. Yeah. And you asked, like, the stupidest question ever, which is, like, does this interest you? Would would you buy this? You know what I mean? Pretty good. Right? Useless question. Yeah.

Yeah.

You're into this. Aren't you? Yeah. You just ask these, like, leading dumb questions. You have another one that I think is pretty good. You go sell more value, not more time. Customers don't value their time. They do crazy things to save two dollars. Don't sell them time because they don't even value it,

sell them more more value.

Yeah. That's especially true in consumer. Consumers really don't value their time.

But even in business, that's true. And so, like, a classic example is

if you you you could have a product, let's say, that makes it less expensive to get marketing leads.

And so you could say this halves your cost

because it does.

But what are you gonna gonna do with the money? They might just save it. Possible. What they could do is buy more leads.

So it also could you could say the same thing as double your leads. So that's the same thing. Half your costs or double your leads. Same product.

But how much will I pay for having the cost? I will pay some percentage of the cost that I saved.

Twenty five percent. That's actually kinda high. Usually, people won't pay quite that much. They should. They should pay up to eighty percent, you know, because why not? But that's not really how people think about it.

So you could you could maybe, charge twenty five percent of the cost you save. But if you say double the leads, what will they pay? Well, what were they paying now for leads? A lot. What will they pay to double the leads? The same amount?

There'll be a hundred percent more to double the leads because they are already willing to pay that for leads. They're as demonstrated by they're doing it right now.

So it's the difference between

twenty five percent of one half

of their spend, which is an eighth or a hundred percent of their spend.

Same product. So it's just now now the assets ideal wise and so forth, but it just goes to show. Saving money, saving time. It's not a bad proposition,

but often the same product can be shown to generate value instead of saving time. And all of a sudden, it's literally an order of magnitude more valuable.

Now you could take all of that in price, but as a a a quote that I took from Michael Malbousen, who's amazing,

in finance, but startup folks haven't heard of him. He has this great thing about this, which is the thing to do, I'm paraphrasing, but the thing to do is to generate customer as much value as you can for the customer and then decide how to split it with them.

So you could split it with them by charging more.

You could split it with them by higher retention.

They just love you and they stay at getting so much value or getting new customers advocacy. They love you so much. They talk. Like, these are all ways you could value harder to measure than price. I grant you that, but they're they're very real. It's very real. In terms of their healthier business and the risk and the growth, like very real and all those things. So,

of course, that's a that's a something of a subjective statement. I I get that, but nevertheless it's it's really useful to think. First, generate a lot of value, then think. Now how do I split that with the customer,

whether that's some price, I'm not. And if so, what how even if it is priced, how am I positioning that with them as in more value versus

less, you know, saving money or less cost or less time, something like that?

The only way that this story not ends, but, the exit, you guys have to take this public. Right?

There's a there's a variety of things you can do when you're our size. One is going public. One is that, another PE firm. Another one is getting purchased by a sufficiently large company, either directly or due to another,

investment, which again could either be a private thing like PE or it could be on the they they might be on the public markets and and therefore have a stock sale or something like that. You wouldn't you wouldn't want that though. Right? So the the way I think, you you should build a good company is you want optionality, the ability to sell and add good terms, but not not have to. The ability to raise more money at good germs, but not have to. Right? The ability to go public, but not have to. Like, optionality

is power.

So how do you do that? You build a good company in the usual ways, the company that's growing and is profitable, and the employees are happy as evidenced as by they stay. And customers are happy as evidenced by it. They stay. You know, like, these very obvious things of, like, what's a good company? You do that, and that maximizes your options because you had because It's good and and therefore, you know, privacy. That's what I've said all along and still believe this very day. That's the right thing for us to do is that. I ask you one quick question as we wrap up? We talked about, TKO.

Sean and I both love them, but this was the we were talking about stocks. He he picked the company that owns UFC and WWE,

TKO

is,

I don't know, majority minority own or, you know, one of the brainchilds behind TKO is,

Silver Lake Partners. And their CEO,

I think his name is a a gone Durban, is that how you say his name?

I was looking him up the other day. Real fascinating guy. Does he sit on your board

Is that right? Did I see that? No. No. There's there's

we have several people from Silver Lake on the board.

Really impressive, interesting people who have really helped the company. Yeah. What are those guys like?

On the finance side,

It's just this level above what you'd ever see otherwise.

Right? Because in finance, you either go to Wall Street to make a lot of money or you could do PE, but, like, is the cream of the crop. Like, they have, you know, the, you know,

validictorian from Warton doing, like, spreadsheets. Right?

And that and then it goes up from there. So it's just like this amazing,

analysis and inside the things. Plus, of course, they see a lot of different companies so they can bring a lot of, like, is happening to a lot of our companies now. That sort of thing. Another thing I will say that's special is you you think PE and you think, okay, well, they just take the companies apart and don't care. And of course, there are those kinds of PE that that absolutely exists. So that that reputation is earned. With Silverlake though, that's not the case, That's not the reputation they have. So when you have,

an investor who, on the one hand, sure, they can they can do all the cutthroat stuff they're capable of all of it. But also they have that sort of a view on what is product, what is success, how do you build value?

That's incredible. So so Silver Lake has been really amazing. But, obviously, it it there are two things. One is a lot of firms aren't like that. The other thing is it depends on the person. If a different set of people on the board, we'd have a different experience, and that's true of all investors everywhere. So,

a lot of times people are like, should I should I raise money from x where x is some venture firm? And the answer is always

who at x, because the firm is is There is something because there's a culture and there's an attitude. It's not nothing. It's not nothing. But the number

one thing is who at the firm. That's what makes all the difference. And, unfortunately, that can change. Well, we appreciate you doing this, man. Jason Cohen,

a smart bear on Twitter, a smart bear,

on a smart bear dot com, your blog. It's the best man. You're the man. We appreciate this. This is fun. That's the pod.