00:00
Would you rather own a small piece of something huge or a big piece or everything of something much smaller?
00:11
I feel like I could rule the world and know I could be what I want to.
00:15
I put my all in it, like, days off on a road. Let's travel never looking back. Sam, where are you dude? This looks awesome. You're at, like, a pool or backyard. You're in the Hampton's, what going on? I spent the weekend at my in laws house in the Hampton's, and I felt pretty sick yesterday. So I just stayed the night here. I didn't feel well. I'm feeling fine now, but I'm in I'm in the Hampton's. It looks good. Right?
00:36
I mean, it looks amazing. Yeah. It looks like what I met. I've never been to the Hampton's.
00:41
Not even close.
00:43
Never got an invite. I don't even know anyone that lives in the Hampton. So let me let me tell you my opinion. Okay. My opinion of the Hampton's?
00:50
Incredibly overrated.
00:52
You wanna know another thing that's incredibly overrated, Central Park, Central Park, so overrated.
00:58
Central Park and the Hampton's both overrated. The Hampton's not it's not that pretty. It's not that pretty at all. So very So what's the appeal? What what is good about it?
01:09
If you're in New York,
01:10
it's only an hour hour and a half away without traffic. So you can go to the beach there. So it's a little bit like, Sonoma or Napa. Like, I think those places are nice.
01:20
They're not the best. They're kinda boring as far as Napa is Napa and Sonoma are prettier than the Hampton's without a doubt, in my opinion.
01:28
Oh, okay. Interesting.
01:29
And,
01:30
do you, like, do you feel different? You walk around every car is, like, a bentley or better? You have to have a range rover to fit in. It's crazy, man.
01:39
Not my style at all. It's very it's not it's not even remotely my style.
01:44
Did you see the Jake fall Paul and, Tyrone Tyrone Woodley fight last night?
01:50
Did I tell my wife I can't help with the kid's bedtime routine? Cause I'm watching the Jake Paul fight? Yeah. I did that. And then I watched that fight, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was an amazing fight. I thought it was, a good fight. I thought Jake Paul, well, I had higher expectations. The drama was there. Like, I'm not saying where the technical boxing was I'm saying the drama was there. I didn't know what was gonna happen beforehand.
02:11
And then every round, it still felt like anything could happen, which is what you want. The drama was so high. It my my my anxiety level was equal to the best UFC fight. Like, like, the best grudge UFC fight,
02:26
my, like, anxiety level was equal to it. I thought it was amazing. We had Jake Paul on the podcast.
02:31
He, was way different on the podcast than he was in, like, for the for this whole, boxing thing. But, anyway,
02:38
it was I was gonna tweet it out. I was like, hey, congrats to to guest of episode one hundred and seventy on your victory tonight.
02:46
Yeah. It it it was a it was a fun fight Happy. I got to watch it. It was more it was more intense than any UF as intense as any UFC fight I've ever seen. It was pretty bad ass. They've done an amazing job. Well, let's talk about it a little bit. So they for for those who don't know or kind of just roll your eyes
03:02
at, you're watching Jake Paul and
03:05
Jake Paul fight this guy. Is this rigged? What's the point of this? Is any of youTuber?
03:10
Like,
03:11
I got a lot of respect
03:12
for what they did. I'm pretty impressed by this. I think that
03:16
this move they did to go from
03:19
youtuber
03:20
viner to YouTuber,
03:22
and then YouTuber
03:24
to basically
03:25
one of the best business models you can do as a
03:29
as as a single person is basically sell paper views.
03:33
And,
03:34
why is that? Right? So, like, this fight, I wouldn't be surprised if they sold a million paper views
03:39
And so you sell a million paper views at, you know, roughly sixty bucks of paper, you know, perfect review.
03:46
You know, that's sixty million dollars. And then they partner up with showtime to do that, to do that whole thing. And so, you know, they can make ten million bucks
03:54
in one hour doing this, right, to a and and basically a single event
03:58
And you you that's totally different. And it and it grows their brand. Like, this whole thing makes them more famous because ESPN is talking about it and Twitter is talking about it. Everybody's talking about it. And, they're doing kind of like a hobby that they like, which is boxing. Right? They train hard, so it's not easy, but man, is it lucrative? So, like, pretty impressive jump from one platform to the next. And as a business person,
04:21
I think they're geniuses. I think they are whether it's intentional or unintentional, they are geniuses.
04:26
The way that they approach this, the way that they promote these things, the way they leverage the brand,
04:30
it's genius. Also getting in a ring in front of a million people, getting in a ring in front fifty people, it's incredibly frightening.
04:38
Now to do it with someone who's, like, even though Woodley's a yeah. He's at the end of his career. He's forty.
04:45
He fucking kills people. Like, he crushes people. Like, he could he you definitely could die. I mean, it's not likely, but you could. And that's incredibly bold. And so Very likely you could get humiliated
04:57
backed out brutally by this guy, you know, in front of everybody. Yeah. One hundred percent. And so I do think it's incredibly courageous. Even though whether I agree or don't agree with, like, a lot of the shit they do,
05:10
It's wild. I can't believe they pulled this off. It's wild. It's incredibly wild. The crowd
05:15
on TV, I've been to, like, three or four or five. I forget how many UFC fights. And I've been to some of the big ones at Madison Square Garden. The crowd on the TV, like, on the act in Cleveland last night, you felt the same as when I saw UFC fight, like, the same energy. It was pretty wild. They built this. They, yeah, they they did it. They pulled it off.
05:32
I also went to,
05:34
a live, MMA fight, a local one here in San Francisco. Where? In the, the dragon den? Dragon house. Yeah. Amazing. You bite to one? Went to them together. This weekend. I went to one. I've been to a bunch there. It's bad ass. Right? It's way scarier than UFC. Way way more than it's so so we get cage side seats because they're only fifty bucks. Right? So, like, the Yeah. You know, it it is not a huge stadium. It's keys our stadium. It's a very small place, but
05:59
we went there. We get cage site seats for fifty bucks
06:02
since COVID, you know, started. And they said, like, oh, everybody's gotta be vaccinated. They didn't check anything at the door. So that was not so great. But I walk in and
06:10
the crowd is just lit. I don't know what because they're all well, they're all, like, super drunk. And so it's Yeah. So so I think there's, like, four or five factors going in. So first of all, it's their friends fighting, usually. So, like, there's a whole in every fight There's at least, like, twenty people that are there because they're friends with this person. Because these are amateur fights. These are people who by day, you know, they deliver for DoorDash. Or they, like, working a, you know, consulting company or whatever. And then this is, like, a nighttime fight club thing for them where they just, like, decided, screw it. I'm gonna try this. Because I get there early. I get there for the amateur fights. I find those way more interesting than the pro fights. And,
06:48
so first there's there's twenty people that for that's that's their friend, that's their brother, that's their kid. I'm seeing moms just yelling, like, kill them because it's like their son in in the in the ring or whatever. Second thing is,
07:00
it's like people are drunk. Yeah. So people are drinking. There's only, like, one confession. There.
07:05
One concession and it's only beer. So I was like Well, they only sell they only sell beer and Costco pizza. Right? Yeah. Exactly.
07:13
It's like beer and things that make you want beer. And then third thing is,
07:17
I think so I think the third one would be,
07:21
I'm so used. Like, you're in the Hampton's right now, dude. I
07:25
I just hang out online on tech Twitter and crypto Twitter and, like, the group of people I normally hang out with are so nerdy and
07:33
Like, they're they're just concerned about different things. The priorities are different. I went to this thing and everybody's like super dressed up. Like, not like fancy, but they were dressed up like I might I might meet someone here. Like, this is like a club to them. Right?
07:46
I just feel like everybody here, it was like more real people than the, like, kind of bubble that I usually live in. And so it was just different. It was like shocking. There was three fights that broke out in the crowd. Just after after if I would be done, if I would break out in the crowd. And I'm sitting there with my sister and my brother-in-law. We're just hoping it doesn't happen near us. And the last thing was COVID,
08:07
like,
08:08
COVID, I think, has riled people up. Like, when I came in, I was telling my brother-in-law, I was, like, dude, this crowd is way better than the last time we came to Dragonhouse Bico, and he goes, dude people are ready to live. He's like, people were just ready to get out. And you could see it. Dude, people were just, like,
08:25
I don't know I don't know how the kids use the word lit, but people were lit at this event. This was the whole event was lit. It was insane. I love go to those. I've probably been to three of them. Were the mongols there? Guess they weren't there because, they can't travel. No. No. I've been there and there's they have there's, like, a large, like, contingency
08:41
in Mongolians.
08:42
And and they have their family there. There was one Mongolian fighter, and he yeah. His crowd was like, his crew was pretty crazy. And then
08:50
that he fought this Irish dude, and I I swear to god, it was like Connor McGregor came out. As soon as the guy comes out, it's like, oh, let Ole. Olle. The whole crowd is chanting Ole. I'm like, where did this huge Irish contingent come from? He's got a tattoo silhouette of Ireland on the side of his body. He gets in the ring and they had a crazy fight. And so it was it was a lot of fun. First of all, so if you have, like, a I don't know if people I don't know if it's only people who like UFC, but if you like UFC, which is, like, maybe one percent of our audience.
09:17
Go to a local show.
09:19
I bet it's more.
09:21
Go to a local show. I I didn't think it would be this good. It's like amazing. It was, like, truly amazing. But it also made me feel like, what is it about people
09:30
who would anybody sign up to do this? And then I know you are the type who you sign up to get punched in the face quite a bit.
09:37
What's the appeal? And would you ever do this? Well, I signed up for a smoker. So what a smoker is is
09:43
it's, amateur. So there's no judges. And typically, you can kinda have, like, in
09:47
a you can, like, say ahead of time. Like, hey, I'm new. You're new. Like, you're you you don't actually at the fight that you went into, they're going in with bad intentions. You know, they wanna hurt you. With the the thing that I signed up for, sometimes, like, you'd be like, hey, let's let's get after it, and you'll try to knock people out. And you might get knocked out, but it's, like, not nearly as angry. And you could, like, say, hey, you're we're going too hard. Let's take it easy. So I've taken a lot of a sparring session.
10:10
It's above a sparring session, but it's not a quite a real fire. At least it doesn't have to be. And I signed up for it because
10:17
it makes me feel alive. It makes me feel,
10:21
like, I feel soft when I just sit in front of the computer all day. It makes me feel good to survive getting beat up because I know that I'm not gonna be stressed out about anything else that I'm gonna do throughout the day. Because, like, when I stress out about, like, this podcast
10:34
or if I get mad that our freaking internet wasn't working really well, I'm like, dog, I just got my ass kicked. Like, Like this, like, everything else is fine. Exactly. I went skydiving once, and we did it in the morning. It was like eight in the morning. And so the rest of the day, like, you know, from eight thirty onward, instead of having only last, like, five minutes. Like, you're just you fall for sixty seconds, and then you've kinda float down gently for five minutes, and then it's over. But the rest of that day, I was like, I couldn't be bothered by anything else. I do. I jumped out of a plane this morning. You think I'm gonna worry about this presentation I have or this person who didn't call me back or this person who cut me in line. Like, bro, I I flew.
11:11
I was flying in the air this morning. And so it was, like, If I could bottle that feeling up and have it more often, which it sounds like you get by by sparring, what whatnot, that's pretty good. I also have been rewatching breaking bad. So, did you watch breaking bad, like, once?
11:25
Yeah. So I just I just started rewatching
11:28
it. And, it's like enough years have gone by where I kinda forgot it. And that's basically the premise of the show. The show is basically
11:35
this guy lived kind of his whole life, you know, by the book and was, like, always, like, kinda just, like, worried about, you know, didn't wanna offend anybody. It didn't take much risk. Blah blah blah. And then when he finds out that he's got, you know, a few months to live, he starts doing this stuff
11:48
initially to help his family. Like, how do I how do I provide my my family. If I pass away, I don't want them to have nothing because I'm just a teacher. I didn't save up too much money. And then once he starts to do it, it starts to feel good. He starts to feel alive. And so this has become kind of like a theme I'm thinking about. And, like, if we wanna tie this to business, I'll I'll force it here, which is
12:07
There's probably a whole set of products or experiences
12:12
that just make somebody feel alive, and they're kinda counterintuitive.
12:15
Like, why would you choose to get punched in the face? Why would you choose to take this risk and almost get caught by the cops? And then how do you bottle that up and package that in a product or service so that because I think a lot of people do want this feeling. And once they get it, I think it's very addictive.
12:30
But I would say that that's what you do with a lot of your investments. Right? Like, when I think about what you're doing with an NFT or what you're doing with crypto, to me, it's a high adrenaline,
12:38
high risk,
12:40
type of thing. Right?
12:42
Kind of. I think you'd think I'd take more risks than I actually do, but, but, yeah, I I could see that. That's definitely a piece of it. There's a bit of the roller coaster that you get to go on. A roller coasters for a thrill seeker. But I just think in general, like, you know, we were in LA. I went to Disneyland. Why are there even roller coasters? Right? Well, because people in thirty seconds, you can get that feeling. Like, you might die and then you live. And that little package
13:06
that thrills, it taps into this thrill secret part of people. And I I just feel like There's probably more experiences that could be built that are like that. I think if you're building in VR, for example,
13:16
instead of trying to build a VR, like, kinda like fantasy land. I would build things in VR that make people feel a little bit as afraid, a little bit scared, a little bit alive. And I think a lot of video games try this. Right? Like, I have a lot of video games around shooting people and stuff like that because it's it's cool and it's an escape and it's something you can't do in real life. So you get to, like, live vicariously through this. I just think there's a lot more that could be done.
13:39
So instead of talking about
13:41
fear, can I tell you something that I read recently that's it's about happiness? Can I tell you something that totally, like, kinda, like, I read something recently,
13:50
and it the data seems pretty clear? And it totally,
13:53
like, goes against what we've been told previously. Can can I tell you about that? So so layout layout what we've been told and then what you saw. So the, you know, there's these, like, things that you see headlines. So one of these headlines is, like, the average American doesn't have five hundred dollars in savings or something like that. That's Right. That that's that's mostly bullshit, by the way. That's that's a bullshit headline. But the other one was that after you make seventy five thousand dollars,
14:17
your perceived happiness level doesn't really go up significantly.
14:22
And I read about that a while ago. We read about I mean, when did that come out, you think? Like, in two thousand twelve or something, two thousand time. Yeah. I feel like I've heard this kind of my whole professional life. So maybe at least twelve, fifteen years, something like that. I have always thought that that was bullshit. I've always thought that was bullshit.
14:37
They didn't pass the sniff test for you. Not even a little bit. Not even a little bit. And so I came across this study. And so what these guys did was they got forty thousand people to install this app. And this app at random times would ask you, like, they would ask you a bunch of questions but it would be on a scale of, like, one to five or one to ten. I see you're highlighting the app. You could click it and you could see it. It's called track your happiness.
15:01
Yeah. And and it's pretty cool. It's just a simple app. And what they did was they got thirty five, forty thousand people, and they ranged they had all types of ranges, and they asked people how they felt during different periods of the week of the day, and they would track your income.
15:15
And what they found is is that while
15:18
It is true that after you get past a certain point, your happiness levels doesn't necessarily,
15:24
go up in proportion.
15:25
But what this study found is, like, up until, like, five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred thousand dollars a year, it it was definitely still going going up.
15:34
Like Yeah. We can we can show this graph. If if if you're watching on YouTube, we'll put this graph on the screen. And it's basically two lines. It's your, life satisfaction.
15:42
And your, experience well-being.
15:44
And,
15:46
they're both,
15:47
like, from fifteen thousand dollars of household income up to five hundred thousand dollars. They're tracking, like, up into the right, just like a straight line. So the more income you were getting, the more sort of life satisfaction you were having,
15:59
at each step of those. It didn't just plateau at seventy five thousand, like, the the old kinda like that quoted quoted study is. And it may like, the difference between two million and three million probably won't be significant. But, like, according to this study, like, the difference between ten million and one million is significant and does impact your happiness,
16:16
And that totally, like, kinda broke my frame, even though I always thought it would be true. I thought this study was actually really interesting, and there's a few reason why a few reasons
16:24
why, basically, the other one was nonsense was the first one was remembered feelings. So the seventy five thousand dollar study, basically, what they did was they asked people how they felt in the past. And that's kinda bullshit because you always think that you remember,
16:37
things better than you actually did. Or, like, during the during one period, you'll think it's great. And then you'll say how you remembered it, and you'll think it or sorry. You'll during the time you think it's horrible, then you'll look back and be like, oh, that was actually awesome. Right. This actually asked you right then and there, how you felt. The second thing was before it said, were you happier then or were you happier now? And that's kind of nonsense because there's no variance. Like, the variance is too low and, like, you know, sometimes, like, it could be a while. I'm a little bit better, and that matters. And so that's It's too binary. It's it's just yes or no. There's no, like, there's no granularity.
17:09
Yeah. So I don't know. I thought this was interesting. I wanted to bring this up because that's one of the that's one of the studies that I always thought that people based, like, you read this headline and you believe this to be true, and a lot of people probably make decisions based off of this. And I think it's important to say, no. That's I think it's bullshit, and and you shouldn't base your life on that data or that study. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I I like, I love this topic, by the way. I think it's great. Is sort of like myth busting of these, like, common things you hear. Like, another one who's, like, the ten thousand hour rule that got really popular because Malcolm Gladwell wrote this book called outliers. And he's like, oh, you know, to be great at something, you gotta spend ten thousand hours. And, and so then a lot of people run with that. And it's like, well,
17:49
There's obviously a bunch of caveats, but, like, the caveats get stripped away as the thing just gets kinda, like, turned into a fortune cookie tweet. Right? It's like ten thousand hours. That's the rule. And,
17:59
and sure there's instances where somebody spends ten thousand hours. It gets really great at something, but there's definitely instances where it doesn't take ten thousand hours to get great at something. I've had many of them in my life. And, and so you wanted, like, I guess, question a lot of these things that you're told and try to figure out What what's the truth and what's the truth for me? What am I gonna experience? What do I choose to believe? And so I'm with you on,
18:20
on looking into stuff like this. Also think this app is cool. This tracker app I'm gonna actually use it. Where at my previous company,
18:28
when I was running the ideal app, It was my first time, like, as CEO of, like, a larger group. We had, like, twenty something employees,
18:36
at that time. And that was I was twenty five years old. It was the most people I had ever managed. And I was like, okay. Well, how do I manage people? I was like, well, there's a whole bunch of books on this, but
18:45
I created something pretty simple. I asked one of the programmers, went to the guy Quinn. And he's like this young hacker guy. And I was basically like, hey, Quinn.
18:52
I would love to know. I would love to just kinda like if I could go have a conversation with each person each day saying, hey, how are you feeling?
18:59
How's it going? I think I could be a better manager, but that would take way too much time. And it would just also be like a full on conversation with each person. I said, can you just set up a thing so that at the end of every,
19:10
like, work day? So, like, four thirty PM or whatever,
19:13
It just pings everybody individually in Slack, and it just says, hey, Sean.
19:17
How you feeling today? You know, one to ten. And, what what's your happiness right now? And it would just I it would basically do what this app does. And they would put it in. And then I had a dashboard as the manager as the CEO that would show me all these different people. And what I found was two things. The first is
19:33
some people
19:34
have a very narrow range of emotions that they feel. So, like, there's, like, our CTO is this a British guy, Paul, and he's a he's very kinda like stoic. He's sort of, like, you know, like, British sort of dry humor.
19:46
And so, like, he never too too high up, too high down. Like, he was always like a, you know, like a seven or an eight. He didn't he never hit a ten. He never hit a five. He always stated that range. So I had to interpret his data differently because I was like, for this guy, his self assessment of his own, like, kind of like happiness or well-being, his his range is different. I can't just say, oh, eight. You're good. Eight is actually
20:07
great for him, and a seven is actually quite bad for him. Whereas for other people who are, like, you know, the hot mess folks. It's like some days it's a one, and some days it's a ten. And I had to interpret them differently. So that was the first observation.
20:21
The second was
20:22
when I would go and, I I could I could ping them afterwards. I could just say, you know, it could basically ping them once they submit their score. It would say, cool. Do you wanna add a note on why?
20:31
And the reasons that affected people's happiness
20:34
were so different than what I would have expected. I thought people would be unhappy because you know, they feel, like, underpaid
20:41
or overworked
20:42
or, you know, maybe their colleague sent something to them. And it was always, like, the smallest shit. It's, like, like, what? It'd be like, you know, it'd be something like,
20:52
oh, you know, at lunch today. You know, I whatever.
20:56
You know, this table was full. So I kinda had to go sit over there or it'd be like, you know, at,
21:01
you know, we we're working on this project. I really wanted to get more done, but I got a phone call. I got distracted. It's like they were, like, some people were, like, real they some people got off on high output. And so their happiness was, like, It's like, oh, yeah. We had to do that team meeting. And so I didn't get to go work on my prod. I didn't get to write enough code today, or it'd be, like, something really, really small. It's like, yeah, I'm really dealing with this kinda, like, pain so this chair is really uncomfortable. It was always things that I wouldn't have otherwise seen, and so it brought those to the surface. And then I could decide, is this something I could affect and, like, improve or do I just, like, at least I get a better understanding of them? So that was, like, one of the better products that we built. We probably should have productized it. And made it an actual, like, work tool for other people to use. Yeah. I used to use this thing called fifteen five. You remember that company?
21:47
They're doing pretty well, dude. I think they're they have pretty successful.
21:50
I bet they I bet I would bet they are. So they kinda, like, went quiet for a little while. And and typically, that means that failing horribly or it's actually quite large. Like, it's usually like one or the other. And so it it was called fifteen five. And, basically, they would send you five the whole product, it was very simple, and it's probably thrived during COVID.
22:08
But, basically, they send you an email every day And it takes
22:12
is it fifteen questions that are five minutes to answer, or it's fifteen minutes to answer five questions, one of those. And that's all it is is they just you an email at the end of the day, and they said, what did you get done today? How do you feel?
22:23
Yep.
22:24
And that's all the product is. And I would imagine that it's quite large. Yeah. I think it it raised at, like, a hundred thirty million dollar valuation recently or something. So, you know, maybe that's a little out of date. That's twenty nineteen. So I bet it's doing doing pretty well. Alright. Let's do a different topic. What do you wanna talk about? Alright. Let me tell you about a different, a different company that I recently co discovered. So it's called ESRI.
22:46
Have you ever heard of that? No. Sounds like a government agency.
22:50
Kinda. Okay. So ESRI. So basically, there's this entire,
22:55
sector, the entire industry that needs important map information. If you scroll all the way down to where it says felt, you'll see where I am. Yep. But, basically, the idea here is
23:04
there's this company called ESRI. It was started in the nineteen sixties. It's one hundred percent owned by this one guy and his brother. So one hundred percent owned by the same family. No debt. They've never taken any side funding. You can't find anything about it. It does over a billion dollars a year in subscription revenue. And, basically, what it does is In subscription revenue, nice. Yes.
23:22
It's software. It's a soft I guess it I guess you could call it information, but probably at this point, software because it started in the sixties. So at the time, it was basically but what it what it does is very simple. So twenty thousand plus cities use it. So most cities, most, like, reasonably sized cities in America use it. Most states use it. Most fortune five hundred companies use it. And what it does is they have loads of,
23:44
of information on maps. And so if you're a government and you wanna build new gas, new new pipes or something like that in your city, you're gonna take their data, and you could also give them more data, and it's gonna give you an interactive map that you can use to figure out where the other pipes are, and you're gonna be able to build this this this pretty complex system that you can continually use year over year. That's gonna show where your pipes are. It's called geographic information system. You never heard of g you never heard of that term? GIS. Yeah. I've heard that. Yeah. I thought for sure you would have heard of that. So, it's almost like, Google Maps on steroids. So in the same way that Apple or sorry, the same way that It's like b to b Google Maps. Yes. In the same way Uber uses one of the Apple or either,
24:26
Google Maps. This is what, like, the city of like the Hampton's would use when they're building new roads and when they're building new electricity.
24:34
Now, the the there's a few reasons why this is interesting. One, it's one of the most complex and one of the most interesting family owned businesses I've ever seen. Total monopoly. So in the way that they got their monopoly is they go into colleges so they work with engineering students. They've worked really hard on making sure all the colleges that give their software to for free. So the engineering students start using it at a very young age and they're used to it. Then when they graduate, oh, yeah. Let's just use ESRI so they know exactly what they're doing. And it has a total moat also because selling to a government is impossibly hard. It's incredibly difficult. Why? Because when you're a government, you wanna make sure that the vendor that you're using takes one hundred percent responsibility of something f's up. And so when you're like signing up if you're a government employee, if you're working at a fortune five hundred employee, you want to cover your ass insurance. You know, you want a company that's, like, well known and, like, not new, and, like, they're gonna take responsibility if something bad happens. That's ESR,
25:23
crazy fascinating company. But I'm curious about which businesses are gonna because whenever you see something old, you know, from the nineteen sixties as a software company, you think, Well, like, surely, they're, like, you know, you can't crush it forever. Also, the founder of this company, ESRI probably worth ten billion dollars at this point. I think he's, like, eighty five years old. So he's gonna die. He's gonna they're gonna lose its way. Like, this is just inevitably how it works. Did this guy's name, by the way? Jack Dangermond?
25:48
Six. Is that his name? Right. This danger mind? I mean, come on. That's,
25:54
how old is he? I can see why people don't wanna compete with this guy. He's pretty old. I don't know. He doesn't look like he's, like, he's eighty. It looks like he's, you know Well, he's rich. Sixty, seventy, something like that.
26:04
Yeah, personal fortune, four billion dollars himself.
26:07
Yeah. And he started with his brother when he was, like, twenty seven, crazy, fascinating business, crazy, fascinating business. And I can process it. Taken a cent outside of a five thousand initial loan from Dangerman's mother.
26:19
Crazy. Right? Crazy, fascinating company. And and he seems through I mean, you know, what I read about him seems like a good guy, him and his wife he's an environmentalist. So he started this because he cared about, like,
26:30
wildfires and things like that. And he was building software to help create maps that
26:34
somehow reduced wildfire, which I'm gonna explain in a second. But, basically, there's a new company. There's a bunch of new companies coming out. The first one is called felt. So go to felt dot com. It totally is not I went to this. It looked it looked it looked well, this is like an early access site, but
26:49
my
26:50
I saw it and I said, oh, this is kinda interesting. So I started looking into it. I've read your notes on it. This felt thing seems pretty cool. Are you investing in this? This seems like kinda awesome.
26:58
Nope. I I we just I've I've never talked to this person. So it started by a guy named Sam Hashimi. He's his first company was called Remix. It was a city transportation planning startup that he sold hundred million dollars. And when he was doing that, he learned all about the,
27:11
inadequacies
27:12
of, like, basically using maps and creating maps for your service. And he said, well, I'm gonna credit create a better map business, something that,
27:20
people can, add stuff to. And it's almost like,
27:23
where where ESRI is, like, Google Maps This is, like, ways. So people can contribute to it if you use it,
27:30
kinda fascinating.
27:31
And,
27:32
it seems very, very interesting. Thing. And I always like these old school companies. I mean, I like this company, this guy Jack started. I think it's bad ass. I love seeing the new guys that are gonna try and take this and and kick their ass. I think it's very fascinating.
27:44
Yeah. This is cool. I like this a lot. There was a company called,
27:48
what's the name they're based in
27:51
they spun out of, like, this lab. Hold on. I think you actually might have their name here. It's And and while you're looking for that, so fell, they describe it as the world's first collaborative mapping tool, and it serves a wide range of use cases. So I imagine they haven't said this, but I imagine actually anyone can use it. A user can use it. So if you're going hiking with your friends, if you're planning a trip, you're allowed to use this. I imagine what they're doing is their grand scheme, though, their their niche their wedge is to help wildfires,
28:18
go down. And so the way that you could do that is you can actually use data and you could figure out where wildfires are, where they're gonna happen, and then cities will pay money to use your mapping data in order to reduce wild fires. And I imagine what they're gonna do is they're gonna create this really cool because if you go to felt dot com, it looks very,
28:36
user focus, whereas
28:37
It it's they're gonna make all their money from b to b. So it doesn't look the same. It doesn't look like a b to b product. I imagine what they're gonna do is, like, just like ways you're gonna let the consumers use it and map out really interesting shit And then they're gonna go and sell the data and mapping tools to b to b, to businesses, and that's how they're gonna win. Crazy fascinating. Go ahead. Yeah. I think I think it's cool. The company I seen is called Discartis Labs.
28:58
And, what this met the founder of this at a dinner. And he was telling me about it and I was like, this is kind of amazing. And this became one of my one of my misses. I was like, oh, I really should invest in this. And at the time, I wasn't really investing super actively,
29:11
and I missed the boat. And I think this has become like a very big company. But at the time, I was like, pretty convinced that this is gonna be a winner. And, why why is that? So they spun out of Los Almos
29:21
Alamo's national labs or whatever, which is like in New Mexico or Albuquerque or something like that. It's like this, like, it's kinda like, you know, NASA or something like that. So this is, like, high highly kind of scientific community. They spin out. They create this commercial company,
29:36
that's called Discartis Labs. And what they do is they do satellite imagery. So they would basically take I I don't know if it was their own satellites or other people's satellites, but they would take the imagery of, like, cool. This is image from a satellite of a field. And then they could run all kinds of machine learning and, like, kind of computer vision and and different, like, tech more modern technologies on top of that, and they could give a hedge fund an idea of how much corn yield there is this year. Or they could give, you know, so it's like if you ever watch billions, they they they kinda do something sometimes where it's like, oh, look how many trucks are leaving this factory. So before the earnings call, I can figure out, you know, how much volume they're doing because I can see the rate of change from before to after, things like that. So so they have a whole bunch of different products, but basically,
30:19
At the time, it was, like, they they were, like, trying to figure out how to use it. I think he told me this story, and that this is many years ago. So I may be getting this wrong. But I think what he told me was, At the time, they didn't have that many customers, but their business model was basically just betting on, like,
30:35
futures of corn, crop yields or something like that. Because they're, like, they are putting their own There were their own balance sheet. They were just betting, basically, and they were showing that, like, look, we can actually generate returns using this strategy, but that's how valuable our data is. And I think since then, I I think that was early on when they were, like, just making the technology and playing with But, either it's them or them and a partner doing that. And now I think they have a lot more customers who are looking for this, whether it's, like, you know,
31:01
of agriculture company that has some need because they need to predict, you know, the way that the world is changing, the way that the the the the way that
31:09
anything, any data that you can get from satellite imagery is basically what they do. So I really like that business model as well. Some people are doing that in terms of getting satellites into space. And other people are doing it, taking the satellite imagery and making more sense of it, making more getting more actionable, like, data and insights from that. Did you say the name of the company in front of the founder?
31:29
The name of what company? Oh, no. No. He told me am I saying it wrong?
31:34
I I Is it a French?
31:37
Have you heard of the philosopher?
31:39
Dekhart?
31:40
Yeah. What's the French philosopher's name? Renee Dekhart.
31:44
Maybe. Maybe that's what it is. What did you call it? Descartes.
31:50
It's it's daycart. Yeah. It's the cart. It's like it's like the I don't I forget.
31:55
Renee Decart. Is he the guy who said I think therefore I am?
31:58
Anyway, it's
32:00
that's the one. I think therefore,
32:02
I know. I I know that I I got that pretty bad, pretty badly wrong. I I met this guy years ago, so I don't even fully remember the the idea. I just remember thinking, oh, that's interesting. All my friends are making, like, apps to, like, order pizza and, like, to do lists and stuff like that. And this guy's basically taking satellite imagery and looking at it. And it my my two takeaways were I should probably invest in this guy. And the second thing was, why am I not doing something more interesting with my life? Because that sounds way more cool and interesting and, like,
32:31
probably valuable than competing in this competing around ideas that everybody has and that everybody could kind of
32:38
do. And so that was, you know, a takeaway I had during that process.
32:43
Do you want me to keep going or you want one? No. Do one. Alright. Let me tell you a quick story about a guy named Wayne Hazinga.
32:51
I love Wayne Hazinga. I read his book. I believe it's called building blockbuster. So there's this guy named Wayne Hazinga. Where alright. Now I'm gonna sound uncultured. Is he from? I always get it confused.
33:02
Holland and the Netherlands and Dutch.
33:04
Are they all the same thing?
33:06
Dutch is a way to describe people, I think, from the Netherlands.
33:10
I think Holland might be a part of the Netherlands. I'm not sure. Good. I don't know. I'm sound on culture. I'm sorry. But what what does it say? What does Wayne Hazinga say? So he's of Dutch descent. We will know it. Dutch descent. Change United States from net from the Netherlands. Alright. Good. Alright. So he's born in nineteen thirty seven. Alright. So listen to the story of this guy. Born in nineteen thirty seven, parents divorced at a young age, went to the army,
33:31
And when he was in his twenties, he started this company called Waste Management. Basically,
33:37
he had one moving truck
33:39
or or one truck, and he started a waste management business where you would just go from door to door throwing away your trash,
33:45
and Eventually, like, after only a short amount of time, like, two years, he starts realizing that these,
33:52
this this business is incredibly,
33:55
There's a there's loads of small players who all just own little bits and pieces. And he goes, well, fuck. I'm just gonna buy all of them. And so he starts buying a a shit ton of them. Something like two or three, a week.
34:06
And is of a business eventually become has become waste management. Today, it's got a sixty four billion dollar market cap It's, the biggest waste removal, company in the country, and it's incredibly big. And he left that in nineteen eighty four. So he built this huge business, and you'd think, alright. So, that's great. Go and chill.
34:22
Next, when he was still in his fifties, I believe, he starts a company called blockbuster,
34:26
and so this is in nineteen,
34:28
eighty seven. He bought he found one blockbuster. It was one blockbuster store. He bought it, with a little bit of money. And he took it public, like, two years later. So this guy's like a financial arbitrage machine. So he's like, he's really good at raising money and deploying capital. So he raises this money And so blockbuster after, like, two years, it has seven million dollars in revenue, nineteen stores. And then in just a handful of years, he gives it to four billion dollars in revenue and three thousand stores in eleven countries. And eventually, he sells it to Vycom in nineteen ninety four. This is about, eight years after starting the company for eight and a half billion dollars. And so it's pretty crazy. And if you would have invested twenty five thousand, so he would let some friends invest. And if you would have invested twenty five thousand dollars in in the, blockbuster when it went public and
35:12
in nineteen eighty seven, it would have been worth about a million dollars when they sold. So he's pretty amazing. I mean, he he's he's got a good track record. So He also started something else. Right? He'll start in automation.
35:22
Yeah. So the guy alright. So he's in waste management. He's in blockbuster.
35:26
At this point, he's in the sixties. You think, alright. Now you're just gonna chill. Absolutely not. He starts auto nation, which is at this point, it's the largest
35:34
seller of used cars in America.
35:36
So he went from Waste Management
35:39
to blockbuster
35:40
to cars. And then throughout this whole period, he's also doing the same with resorts. So have you ever heard of, extended stay America? I believe now it's owned by Marriott. You never heard of extended Save America. So, basically, they've got they've got something like five, six, seven hundred
35:55
motels that are nice enough that you could stay for, like,
35:58
a handful of, for, like, a month or, like, two, four weeks at a time. He started that He also started a bunch of different golf clubs. And then in the nineties, he eventually buys the Miami dolphins, and I think he bought another Florida. What's the Florida football team? We the so that's the dolphins, and then he bought the the Florida Marlands, also the baseball team. The Marlands.
36:17
Pretty amazing. Is this in And and so I always was amazed at this guy. And, the reason I was amazed at him is he had an incredibly positive attitude when he was doing this whole thing. And so here's a few things. What here's a few quotes that I have from his biography that he talked about were his philosophy. The first, we made small acquisitions in different states around the United States. They were easier, faster and cheaper to go in and buy out a guy who's already established in a market, even if it was very small, then I'd hire a bunch of sales people to go out and do the internal growth. The plan was always to have internal growth, but in order to get internal growth growing quickly, it was sometimes easy to go out to a certain market and just buy,
36:50
buy a guy who had three or four trucks and say, okay, let's do this on our own. And that's what he did over and over and over and over again. And he did it in all those businesses except for blockbuster, but even then he did it with blockbuster because he started the brand but, and they grew on their own. But eventually, they started buying, like, loads of different mom and top mom and pop movie stores. And this was his whole strategy. There's another guy who did this. His name Bradley Jacob sees,
37:13
is worth like five or ten billion dollars. He did this over and over and over again. And I think that there's still a ton of room to do this. So what what what other industries could you do this in? I've been thinking about this a lot, and I'm not entirely educated on the topic, but I think I think you could do it for all types of moving businesses. Because moving businesses, there's not actually one leader that you trust who's like the best. Right? It's like a lot of mom and pop stores.
37:36
What other industries could you do this, like, consolidation stuff in? I mean, these roll ups happen kind of in every industry. I feel like people have done it with dentists.
37:44
Right now, dentists is like the hottest thing going. There's also like pet, you know, vets,
37:50
you know, veterinary hospitals
37:52
or veterinary clinics. There's pet cemeteries that somebody has told us about that that's like a a pet cremation basically is like another one that you could do, again, fragmented market. There's there's a lot of these years rural wireless internet service providers. There's
38:06
there's a a a huge
38:08
number of these where in a local market, there's somebody who has maybe not a local monopoly, but a a large local footprint.
38:16
And,
38:17
and going in, you can't it's a very it will be it would be too expensive to go in and try to rebuild that. It'll take too long and be too hard to do that in a small place. So you buy it at a fair price, but you buy a whole lot of these and you make the the sort of the sum greater than than the than the than the parts.
38:33
And so I think this roll up strategy
38:36
is
38:36
one of the more, like, I would say
38:39
intriguing ways to build a monstrous empire. Like, Otherwise, you kinda gotta build a, you know, build a Facebook, build a YouTube. It's very hard to build a multi billion dollar individual company from scratch. I think it is far easier to execute one of these roll ups and create, you know, a hundred million dollars, create even a billion dollars of value
38:57
in, you know, five to ten years.
39:00
It doesn't interest me personally, but if I wanted to become a billionaire, I think that this would be the one of the lower risk ways to get it done.
39:08
One regards to this with local newspapers also. So Rupert Murdoch, this is kinda what he did local newspapers and then local radio stations, local television stations, whatever. He replaced about bought local media companies
39:19
and then aggregated them and rolled them all up and created, like, giant, basic news corp, which is his his, like, mothership brand.
39:26
So yeah. By the way, this guy, Wayne Hazinga, if you're watching on YouTube, put put this guy's face on here from his Wikipedia,
39:32
looks like an evil Steve Balmer. So that that's what this guy looks like. Bradley Jacobs, the other guy you mentioned, who's done this with, XPO Logistics and a couple other companies.
39:41
Literally looks like couldn't be a sweeter.
39:43
You know, someone's sweet sweetheart dad who, you know, coaches the local soccer team.
39:49
I I I love looking at these tech because I think to do this, you gotta be pretty I don't wanna say ruthless, but extremely aggressive.
39:56
Ambitious, a great deal maker. And,
39:59
and and you're moving, like, at a freight train's pace. And so I love to meet these people. Now you can't meet them sometimes. I love to just even look at and just just read their bios. Who who is this person? Where did they come from? Because it takes a very specific attitude to be able to go do this with self storage or local, you know, landscapers, pool construction companies
40:18
rolling them all up. I've read a lot about, both of those guys, and I've seen them talk
40:24
on YouTube. And my opinion of them is that they seem highly ethical.
40:28
They seem incredibly high energy, super high energy.
40:32
And they seem very entrepreneurial, even though they both look like Wall Street suits that don't, like, create, these guys definitely are creators, even though they buy stuff and you think, well, that's not, like, you're not inventing anything.
40:44
And maybe they're not inventing anything from scratch, but they're definitely creators.
40:48
And I because I remember I saw that guy Bradley Jacobs, and I saw what he looked like, and I'm like, dude, this fucking suit. Like, he's just, like, he's just some arbitrage square. And he's not. He totally,
40:58
he's, like, he's a creator, and it's really interesting. He's maybe not, like, Mark Zuckerberg where he's, like, coding shit, but he's a different type of creator, and I really like these type of folks.
41:06
Doesn't this seem a little low? This guy's net worth was two point eight billion when he died? I feel like, how is this guy's net worth so low compared to
41:14
doing autonation, block ways management system doing, doing, blockbuster.
41:19
Like, how's that how does that add up? I think that the number that we have there could be wrong, but I think it's wrong. What I read about in his biography was that with,
41:28
with waste management, because they raised so much money, and because they bought so many companies, they simply didn't own that much of it. I mean, they owned a smaller piece of a massive pie, and they were okay doing And so when he started waste management and when he left,
41:45
he was the largest,
41:46
individual shareholder, I believe, but he probably own, like, single digit percentage.
41:51
Right.
41:52
Yeah. Even just owning the dolphins. I feel like the dolphins themselves are gonna be, you know, five hundred million to a billion dollar franchise. So that seems a little a little low, but, yeah, this guy's definitely the bill of the week, extremely
42:03
impressive
42:04
career.
42:05
You know, shout out to, to this guy. He passed looks like he passed away a couple of years ago at age eighty.
42:11
So, you know, respect. Okay. What what else are we gonna talk about? I have a, I I have another kind of fast growing company I think is worth talking about. This thing called Picasso. Have you seen this? No. I'm gonna Google it. Is that how it's spelled?
42:22
Picasso. Yeah. P a c a s o. So
42:26
two execs at Zillow
42:28
spun out and created this thing, I think a year ago, and it's already worth one or two billion dollars kind of our evaluation world. So I think they created all that value in a basically a year to year and a half. And, and what does it do? It's basically a fucking timeshare.
42:43
So what they do is they buy homes.
42:46
They convert them to,
42:47
LLC,
42:48
and then they sell fractions of that home
42:52
to investors. So they bought, like, you know, let's say a house in Napa Valley. They go buy a million dollar house that converted into
43:00
slices of one eighth. So you can own an eighth of this house for whatever, hundred twenty five thousand dollars. You can buy a piece of this home.
43:08
So you're a fractional homeowner.
43:10
And it's meant to be for second homes. So you don't do this for your home. You do this for your, like, second your vacation home. And,
43:17
when you buy that one eighth of the house, that gets you forty four nights of a stay,
43:23
in that home for the year. And you can either use them yourself. You can gift them to others. I think you can rent them out or get let them rent it out for you. And this company takes
43:33
this insane rake. So they take twelve percent of the purchase price,
43:37
upfront just straight off the bat. And then they charge you a monthly management fee because they have the app that you and the other owners use to coordinate
43:45
who's booking what What's the what's the rental share? What are you how are you sharing expenses? All that good stuff? And if, you know, if the house goes down,
43:53
you, you know, you're on the hook for it. They took their money up front. So I thought this was kind of a
43:59
incredible
44:00
rift on a timeshare
44:02
that,
44:03
I'm surprised frankly, I'm surprised is growing this fast. I didn't Like, it doesn't
44:08
it's not something I look at and I say that's awesome. I wish I had done that or thought of that idea. I actually think this is kind of dumb. What do you think? So time shares, I mean, time shares is a huge business. I I like the idea of a time share is not bad. I would I would be into only one. It's just that I don't wanna go, like, through the sleaziness of
44:27
of of
44:29
you know what I mean? Like You don't wanna sit through the webinar. Yeah. I don't wanna I I don't wanna go to the seminar. So it's it's weird. So I think it could be cool. Why is it worth so much so fast?
44:40
Yeah. I don't I don't know. I mean, they've grown, you know, so it was Caso evaluation.
44:44
I saw it because there was a big protest
44:47
going on. So picasso raises seventy five million goes from launch to unicorn in five months.
44:53
So I think part of it is What was the protest?
44:57
What's that? You said there's a protest?
45:00
Oh, the protest was basically, like, in Napa, the home that they bought the neighborhood was like, yo, what is this? Like, we don't want,
45:08
we don't want this. We don't want this, like, timeshare rental. We don't want all these different people coming through. Why why are they doing this? And so,
45:16
so they basically,
45:17
you know, they were they're trying to, like, they were trying to say, hey, time shares are not allowed. And what this company says is it's not a timeshare. In a timeshare, you own
45:25
a block of time, unless you actually are a part owner of the home, so it's different than a timeshare. And then people were like, dude, you can't just call it cooperative ownership, make up a new term. And, like, it's a timeshare. And so you're kinda going back and forth, about that. So the guy who started his name is Spencer
45:42
Spencer Raskoff. Is that how I say his name? So he started Well, and Austin Allison. So she's actually the CEO. They were both execs at Zillow. So yeah. So one of the co founders name is Spencer. Have you seen what this guy has done before?
45:54
No. I the name sounds familiar. It wasn't he one of the original like founders, of Zillow. Like, yeah. So check this out. At ninety nine, at the age of twenty four, he founded hot wire dot com, a leading travel internet company. I mean, obviously, that's hotels. Right? They sold it for seven hundred million dollars.
46:09
Then he started Zillow and he took it public. He was a CEO through its IPO and bought loads of different companies.
46:16
He's resigned in two thousand twenty. So I guess he's out entirely.
46:21
Then he started dot l a, which is a media company for
46:25
California startup. So I guess that's kinda like a passion project. And then now he started Picasso.
46:30
Do this guy's prolific? And he's on the board of Palants here. This kind of thing This is why it's worth a billion dollars because it's like, oh, the ex CEO of Zillow is doing this new real estate thing. Cool. We're we're we're in and we're sort of price insensitive on, the valuation. So I think it has more to do with the team than it does, probably, the traction in terms of that valuation. Yeah. This guy's a bad ass. I mean, he's he's a hardcore bad ass. Would you would you want
46:55
when I think of these types of things, these companies that raise all this money. We talked about Zillow or we talked about this company, Picasso,
47:01
and
47:02
this guy, it looks like Spencer, that's his history. Also a podcaster.
47:06
He's got office hours podcast. There you go. Oh, we should have him on here. Spencer, if you're listening, come on. Do you think that do you like the strap of raising would you rather own a small piece of something huge or a big piece or everything of something much smaller?
47:24
I don't think about it. That, like, that wouldn't be the deciding criteria. If if it was just between those two, I would rather own the whole thing of a smaller of a smaller thing. I find it to be,
47:34
more fulfilling, and I think economically you end up doing better, you have more options. Because when you own a small piece,
47:40
of a bigger thing. If it happens to go a little sideways and doesn't have big unicorn exit, the go doesn't go public, doesn't get sold for three billion dollars.
47:50
It's very easy to kind of walk away with very little because you raised all this money. So now you you have the first hundred million dollars go back to investors, and maybe you only sold it for for seventy or something like that. Whereas
48:01
you owned, like, a huge amount of the hustle. I think that path is better because you could sell for twelve million dollars and walk away with ten million dollars, you know, like, out of it. And so and so and I think it's,
48:13
it gives you more options on how to build your wealth Now that being said, there's something fun about building something massive and going for something that's, like,
48:22
truly game changing with three extra zeros on the back of it. So, like, you know, I respect both paths. If if I was picking between those two, I would own I would wanna own more of a smaller thing because it gives me more options. What do you think is easier?
48:36
Oh, for sure, owning,
48:38
o owning a small thing. Now easier in one sense, which is It is easier. I think on a day to day basis because you don't have to worry about fundraising, shareholders, other shareholder management, and you get again, you can exit for smaller amounts. The harder part When you go rate, like, these guys just rate seventy five million dollars, they're not gonna feel like they're, like, roughing it every day, whereas when it's your company and, like, I don't know, you probably ran payroll for, you know, in the first year of the hustle. And, and you probably had to worry. Like, let's say, you know, advertisers pull out,
49:09
you know, you probably were feeling that pinch because you were
49:12
more or less bootstrapped. You raised a little bit of money, but, like, Right. I don't think you ever felt like, you know, you have this huge cash cush cushion that you could just fall back on.
49:22
Well, yeah, I did not. But my opinion I I normally would have agreed with you, but well, we had Mark Laurie on the podcast. And I taught I had a lot of his coworkers reach out to me after the podcast. And, basically, mark lowy's our jet dot com, and what he's done is he,
49:37
he what was his vision? He had his, like he had this, like, phrase. And I forget the phrase, but it it was, like, vision, capital people. Is that what it was? Yeah. That's his, his his fun name now, so we could look it up.
49:48
But, yeah, it's it's vision, capital people. Yeah. You gotta write. VCP. Vision. And so he, like, that was his whole premise. He's like everything. I come up with the vision. I get the capital, we get the people. That's what we do. And when he says that, I'm like, that, like, what does that mean? Like, that's a pretty, like, vague, fluffy thing. But I started talking to people who worked with him, and they're like, he did that so well where he would raise all this money. And he really, like, he did a lot of work, but it wasn't like it he wasn't like doing, like, like, like, like, like, you know, the shit that you do when you're just starting out when you don't have any money, you know,
50:23
you like, I I ran my own payroll. I did all the banking. I did, you know, I would go out and get all the vendors. He was, like, he just, like, hired amazing people, and they did most of the work. And he just took care of the hard part of, like, selling people to, join the company and selling people to give them money. And I thought about that. I'm, like, Hey, that does sound so awesome. Yeah.
50:42
It's not pretty awesome. It's not that it's easy. It's awesome. I thought I'd put it. Nothing's easy. Anything anything anything valuable is typically
50:49
You don't go to it because it's easy necessarily.
50:51
But,
50:53
I I I'm totally with you. I
50:55
what's what's more fun? A small vision or a big vision? A big vision. Right?
50:59
What what's, what feels better? Having a lot of ammo and, you know, in terms of capital or being strapped for cash. No. Was we're not only having to worry about how to get customers and grow, but can we pay the bills every single month? But
51:12
on the other side,
51:13
if Sean wants to fuck off for a little while, you can do that. Yes. Exactly. You could you could you can bail for a little I optimize for freedom.
51:21
I optimize for freedom above above most things. And so, like, If you ask me, would I rather my my dad taught me this a long time ago, he told me once because what or my first startup was a sushi restaurant chain.
51:32
And I was like, I was talking about, you know, why it's fun about Milan. He goes, he was trying to convince me to come work in the energy industry. He's like, he he worked at BP.
51:41
So he worked in the oil and gas industry. He's like he's like, you know, the minimum is like, you like to play poker. Right? Now when you go to a poker table, you can either sit down with a hundred dollars or you can sit down with ten thousand dollars or a hundred thousand dollars. You're still playing the same game. You're still gonna sit there for six hours. He's like, it's why not play the bigger game? And he's like, in the energy industry,
52:01
the minimum stakes are in the millions. Nothing happens in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like, you're saying a a restaurant, one location, if it works, produce a hundred thousand dollars a year event at net income or hundred twenty five thousand dollars of net income. He's like, why not just he's like a small project and a big project. If you make it your your obsession, is what you're gonna do when you go start a startup.
52:20
They both take the same amount of time. They're both gonna be all consuming. Alright. So might as well do the one that has the bigger payoff. So when he said it like that, I was pretty sure. Like, that's why my next start. I I stopped the food thing, and I went and did a biotech company because he was right. And biotech, like, our well, we made one deal. It was worth five million dollars. And I was like, wow. That would have taken us, like, five years and twenty five locations to do in the restaurant industry. And this was, like, one
52:46
one great meeting, one great presentation,
52:48
and, like, you know, a year of technology development, and boom, five million dollars came through the door. So I kinda got to taste both sides of it. And so if I was gonna
52:58
a big project and a small project both take the same time, a big project's more fun,
53:02
But what I don't like is big companies because in big companies, I feel like I lose my freedom of my time and my energy of how I wanna spend my day. And so that's why I'm trying to find this mix of
53:13
my perfect situation is I work for myself and pretty much by myself
53:18
but I'm working on things that I feel are big and can pay off big. And with the world or the internet, that's now possible.
53:24
One of the most expensive mistakes ever made. So trends now make millions of dollars in subscription revenue. It's a really good business,
53:31
had we made relatively minor changes, like, not that different.
53:37
Like, it wouldn't have cost us more money. We may be able to have a few more people. We and we are right now, we charge three hundred dollars a year. There's a world where wouldn't have had to have been that much different, and it definitely would have been of similar amount of work. We could have charged thirty thousand a year. Right.
53:51
And
53:52
I didn't understand that for a long time. Now I completely do where it's like it's actually We were talking about that with Hussicon. When you were doing Hussicon, the Hussicon ticket was what two, like, two hundred dollars, three hundred dollars, something like that Yeah. On average. And you had told me, because I was like, dude, why are you doing this, like, events business? You're like, dude, events business is gonna be big. Look at this one. Look at that one. And I went and looked at him because you were right. They did actually, like, make tens of millions of dollars. But I was like, dude, the ticket price of this is three grand minimum. It looks like they have a fifteen thousand dollar ticket package for, like, some people. Yours is like ten times cheaper than that. And you were like, yeah, we should. We could. But you didn't feel comfortable doing that route or whatever. I don't know what your reason was. Because you mean Yeah. I knew. I was being a there's a few things. One, I was a pussy. So I was just I was being fearful.
54:39
And number two, when I started my company, I was, like, twenty four. What I don't and I never had a job before. What I don't understand is how these young guys,
54:47
like, people who are twenty one, twenty two, twenty three, like, when the folks who started box dot com, which is an enterprise cloud company, they were, like, twenty or nineteen, like, in college still. What I don't understand is when you're a nineteen twenty, or in my case, I was twenty four, when I thought about the company, I was like, well, like, I don't have any money. I would never buy something that was two thousand dollars. Now that I'm older and I have more experience, I realized, well, two thousand dollars is not a lot of money. And so what I don't understand is how these young guys who are in their early twenties. They don't have a lot of experience. How they even fathom that someone's willing to spend all this money on their product? They're either just courageous or they have more faith. I don't know what it is. But I but kudos to them because when I was twenty four and starting my thing, even though I could have charged
55:31
way more money. And I tell everyone to do it now. I did not have the courage or the knowledge should do it back then. Right. And you see now because you're inside HubSpot,
55:41
you see how much company spend on just stuff. Like, what amount of money? It's like it's like going to a really wealthy person's house, and then you see them tip, you know, you tip they tip some guy a hundred bucks or they you know, they buy this this fancy espresso machine for eight thousand dollars. It's like, oh, these are normal expenses for them. Then when you're on the outside, you're like, I should be charging a lot more. But when you've never been inside one of these big companies, it feels like a three thousand dollar ask. Dude, I better be giving them, like, my, in my left arm. And it's like, actually, they feel more comfortable with larger price tags and that's, like, then in fact, a three hundred dollar product is a little bit off putting to them and sort of strange to them. Yeah. It's and it's like disrespectful. It's like, dude, this this thing isn't good. Charge more. Right. So, like, when knowing what I know now, and and I think, Mark and Jason's,
56:28
like, I forget, like, this is it it was a very, like, headline y quote. But it was something like if Mark and Dresen had one advice for his his startups, it would be simple.
56:37
Charge more. He was two words. Charge more.
56:41
And,
56:42
because most startups do what I did. You charge way little,
56:46
way less than you should because you I don't know. You're trying to be cute. I I don't know what it is. It it's just it's cuter to be cheaper.
56:54
But it's like insecurity. Right? Because at the beginning, you're like, oh, I just want some customers it's not that big of a deal. Then you kinda get then that becomes the anchor point that you mentally anchor to and the market anchors you too. And then you're afraid if you raise raise prices and everybody gonna run out the door,
57:08
you know, what happens if I raise these prices? I'm gonna get complaints. People are gonna quit, you know, blah blah blah. And so it's it's really like a form of insecurity.
57:16
It's like a corporate insecurity.
57:17
And, and so if you're out there, I've I tweeted this the other day. I was like, if you're working at a company, you'll ask for a raise today.
57:25
But Do you think anyone did that? There there's a sky cycle. I just got a promotion. Go ask for a raise today. But I'm I'm I I don't know. I haven't really proven my go ask for a raise today.
57:35
Everybody should go ask for a raise inside of a big company. Why? Because
57:40
there's almost always wiggle room. Like, like, when I was hiring. They would they had what they called a compensation band. What does that mean? It means for the same role, we can pay this much on the low end or this much on the high end. And guess what? You start people low or in the middle of the scale and then you flex up when you need to. When do you need to? When they ask for more money? And so, like, So there's already in your exact role without getting a promotion, there is more money that can be had. The second thing is what's the worst that happens? They say no. And when they say, no, you might learn something, they might say, no, because, like, they might give you essentially a soft hell no. What's a soft hell no? Hell no is sort of like
58:17
They say no and they they're like, look, if you want more, you can go elsewhere and get it. That's kind of a you're not so valued here. Like, go for it. Or there's a no that's like, look,
58:28
we love you. We value you.
58:30
I would love to give you more. I just can't right now because of x y z or Can you damage can you hit these goals? Because that will help us build this case. And, hey, you're one step closer to making more money than you were before you asked. And so or they say, yes. And boom, you get more money. Like, there's no there's no loss.
58:46
I was, kind of like Except if you work for me, don't come ask me for more money. That doesn't count because I gave this advice. So don't ask me, but, you know, other people, this is for other people. I was notorious at the hostel because when people would ask me for a raise, I'd always say yes.
59:00
It was I was horrible at confrontation. I just said yes to everything. I'm like, oh my god. I don't feel like dealing with this. Yeah. That is not true, dude. You told me a hilarious story. We can bleep this out if you don't wanna tell don't know if you remember me, you, and, and, Fred Sully, we were at, Delarosa, or we were at some some restaurant.
59:16
And you told me the story.
59:19
Okay. Delete this. Do you remember this? No.
59:22
I don't remember it fully, but you were just like,
59:26
no, and you can leave if you think that. And it was just like, it wasn't just nose, like, you don't understand.
59:32
Like, you don't understand. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the story went like how are you? Well Yeah. So I remember this. So I should rephrase this. When people do good, I say yes to everything. When people do bad, they're like, well, I wanna raise. So I'm alright. So you're, like, you are a machine to me. It sounds horrible, but it's like, look, like, our business is a machine. And, like, humans are, like, part of the input. Humans effort are part of the input. Right. And you're asking me for a raise. Right now, I think that the money that you are paid, like, breaks even. So, like, we put money into this into this machine. We put in place.
01:00:06
And we get the same amount out. If I'm gonna give you more amount of money, I'm putting more input, how much bigger is the output gonna be? Because right now, I don't think it's I don't think that it's worth it. And so
01:00:16
I don't think it's worth it. It's and and so if you don't think that that's fair, then you should go to some other machine and figure out where that input can have a bigger output because right now, it ain't working. Right.
01:00:25
Yeah. Exactly.
01:00:27
So I love
01:00:28
I love that because it was a, it was honest.
01:00:31
B, it was a little bit brutal.
01:00:34
And, you know, it was it like I would say you have many, many super strengths like a plus skills, like I would pick you over anybody.
01:00:42
Softly wording
01:00:44
things
01:00:45
is not not one of them. So I found it to be super funny. But it but really Again, even if you find that information out and it hurts in the moment that this person says, look.
01:00:56
It's not like it's not on the table with the way things are currently at. If you find that out,
01:01:02
you know, that's a good that's a good piece of information. It hurts in the moment, but it's a good piece of information because you might say, shit, I need to create more value here. What would it mean? And you can have a conversation. You can say, well, what would I be needing to do for you to feel great about paying me double what I'm making today. That's a question you can ask. They might not know the answer on something, but they'll come up with it. They'll they'll help work with you on it. And then you'll realize Oh, that's where the value is created in my business. And so maybe in this machine, that's where the machine needs the oil. I should go oil that part of it and create all this new output And then, of course, they'll give me some more because I've created all I've created disproportionately more value out of it. And so it's a good conversation to go have. If you haven't had it, you know, with with the people you work with. Alright. Good.
01:01:46
Well, let people think we're gonna do that. Alright. Good pod. Yeah. Let's get out of here.
01:01:58
I know I could be what I want to.
01:02:01
I put my all in it like a day's all done. Oh, let's travel never looking back.
00:00 01:02:07