Encarta | 5 Business Ideas With High Demand & Low Supply

00:00

With the pandemic, a bunch of restaurants have gone online, quote unquote, they have the QR codes. Right? And something that I think of every single time as an internet marketer is why they are not AB testing their menus. And so I think someone needs to go and create AB testing software that restaurants can ingest super easily.

00:25

What's up? Staff. Staff is back, back in the house. One of the most requested

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return

00:30

guests of all time.

00:33

We should have you on more. What are you doing now, by the way? You, you left the Hustle / HubSpot. You went to Andreessen. Is that where you're at still, or you do another thing? Yeah. Exactly. I'm at a16z. I'm their new podcast host. So they've had a podcast for, like, seven or eight years and then it went on hiatus. They looked for a new host and that's me. We haven't gone live yet, but we will be soon. Every time you come on, you bring this, like, document that's basically, like,

00:57

It's sort of what me and Sam do, but when me and Sam do an episode, we have, like, two or three bullet points each, like, three words. And I have two and he has two, and that's how we prepare.

01:07

You send this, like, encyclopedia britannica

01:09

of topics, ideas, like, half baked things in your head.

01:14

So and, like, I'm looking at this. This is, like, seven or eight pages or something like that. Oh, no. Twelve pages long. So,

01:20

we have a lot to choose from. So where do you wanna start I wanted to share this one idea. I think I've actually talked about it on another couple pods, but

01:28

with the pandemic, a bunch of restaurants have gone online, quote unquote, they have the QR codes. Right? And you pull up the menu. Some restaurants have reverted back to the physical menu, but tons of restaurants are still using these QR codes. And something that I think of every single time as an internet marketer is why they are not AB testing their menus. And so I think someone needs to go and create AB testing software that restaurants can ingest super easily.

01:54

And the basis of this is, well, a, if you think about what has made so many internet companies successful. It is the fact that they have these alternate worlds that they can AB test. Right? Google homepage, are we using this font or this font. I'm using this color or this color. Netflix,

02:09

you know, Amazon, every all of these large internet companies have used this, but also there's the

02:15

restaurant equivalent. So the hustle did a story on this woman, Michelle

02:20

Binesh,

02:20

and you can just look up design restaurant menus, the hustle or something like that to get the article.

02:26

But we wrote about this woman who her job was literally to go redesigned menus, physical menus, And based on her understanding

02:35

of human psychology,

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orientation,

02:37

there's like this zed or z effect on the menu and the way people scroll, she was able to figure out how to get one restaurant,

02:45

just as an example,

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to bring in nine dollars more per customer

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by redesigning

02:50

their menu. Same products,

02:53

but just the orientation, the order of the menu, the design of it. And I was thinking,

02:58

Why are restaurants not using this? As in now, we have the QR code, which allows us to direct someone to any unique link. Right? We have the digitization of this. And so you could hire someone like Michelle, and she could probably figure out how to do this for you, or someone should be just create a software that allows restaurants to do this. They don't need to change their menu at all, but they can mess around with the menu design the same way you mess around with landing page design and get higher conversion. And of course, the average restaurant owner is not gonna know how to do this, and that's why I think there needs to be just some sort of software that says, hey, we can increase your conversions

03:31

by fifty percent. We can increase your average customer value by three dollars, whatever it is. And I I haven't seen it anywhere.

03:39

This is amazing.

03:40

This is great. I remember so I I started a restaurant back in the day. My very first startup was a restaurant. And we were but when we finally got to launch, long story short, we were like, do we wanna launch a physical restaurant? We gotta sign this ten year lease with a personal guarantee. That sounds scary. And our mentor kind of was like, could you test your concept?

03:58

By doing delivery only. And basically, it was like a cloud what a cloud kitchen is today, but this was back, you know, more than ten years ago now where there was no DoorDash. There was no Uber Eats at the time. It was like, what if people could just order online? What if you just had a a kitchen nearby downtown? There was no physical seating. There's no there's no storefront. You just deliver. And we were like, okay. Listen. And so we tried it. And when you do that, you're really conscious of, well, our whole menu is online.

04:23

So that means we could run a test to just see, like, what makes people order more or not. And so we did the most basic of AB tests. The first thing we did was We were trying to lower prices, and we talked to this guy, Dan Arielli, who was, he wrote this book predictably irrational.

04:38

And we were like, Dan, hey, we're you know, three dudes trying to build this, like, sushi restaurant startup, you know,

04:45

do you know anything about the restaurant industry? And he's like, I know a lot about the restaurant industry. He goes, I get paid by companies to come in and help them with either the menu or I he told us about some experiment. I think Panda Express had paid him a bunch of money. To do to basically say, could we get people? We have healthy items on the menu and people tell us the reason they don't eat here is because it's unhealthy, but nobody orders the healthy items. So, like, what gives? And he's like, oh, humans are predictably irrational. They'll tell you one thing, and then they won't do it. And he the the one test he had made was when you walk into a Panda Express, Instead of putting both items on the menu and just having you choose, it was right when you walked through the door, it would say there was like a little angel path. It's like if you're gonna eat healthy, go this way. There was like, the devil, if you're gonna eat indulgently, you know, like, if you want full flavor, go this way. And when people make that choice upon walking in, and then they only see a menu of those items, Like, they were happier with their choice, and they ordered more of those items. And so he, like, figured out that was the only way he could design this restaurant to do that one thing.

05:41

And so similarly, he was like, oh, he goes, oh, yeah. I can help your business, your prices are too low. And we go, what do you mean? Like, everybody says sushi's too expensive. We're trying to make it more affordable. Like, was that a bad thing. Wait. You know, like, what are you talking about, man? We're trying to do the people's work here. He's like, he's like, sushi. People, like, do you ever want to if I told you, you can eat cheap sushi. Would you want that? And he's like, no.

06:03

And he's like, you know, he's like, so just like the, you know, wine industry,

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people buy expensive things because it makes them feel good that they buy higher quality thing. And so he goes, just test the price. So we did it. We basically upped the price fifty percent on one menu versus the other. We just AB tested it. And we had like higher conversion rate on the higher price, which is crazy. Like, not even just it netted more money. It was higher conversion rate on the higher price. So that was like, The first time I saw this, like, menu AB testing. I mean, think about how big of a lift that is. Like, if you can convert every customer at a higher rate at a higher dollar amount, that's, like, you know, meaningful in a industry that's, like, ten percent margins.

06:38

And so we did that. Then we tested other things, like,

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instead of just saying, you know, this is, oh, whatever. This is like the Philadelphia role. We use salmon. It's like alaskan salmon.

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Handcaught

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Alaska salmon.

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Farm caught hand hand, you know, handled Alaska salmon or whatever. It would just start adding all these extra words that were, like, meant nothing changed. I think they were all true, but it's, like, always fresh, never frozen, alaskan salmon, handcaught by a farmer near you. And it's like, oh, people, like, love that. And then they would buy more. And so you can see these little menu tricks. Now what I think of, which is your your genius idea is how do you actually turn that into a business where you could become an agency that does for companies. You could become a piece of software that does this as AB testing of QR codes.

07:24

You could do this with physical menus also. By the way, like, If you just give out two different versions of the physical menu and say, and just track the tickets and be like, cool. We know what the what the checkout is for both,

07:36

for how much they spend on both sides, and we could just prove to you that menu design a is better than b. And, like, you know, your current menu was designed by, like, your niece who knows Photoshop. So, like, you know, I think we can do better than that. And if we do that, if we beat your current menu, then you pay us, you know, fifty dollars a month, then we'll keep running tests for you. Yeah. I think this is, actually a really, really great idea.

07:57

Yeah. I I think the key difference I mean, you always look for it inflection points, I think you guys say, or changes. And so before you're right, you could do this with physical menus, but, you know, the data is so much harder to get, and you have to, like, match up the physical menu with the POS software you're using. But now, I don't know what the percentage is, but we all know a ton of restaurants are using these QR codes. And so they're already they've, like, taken the major step that they went before of digitizing the experience. And so now what you need to do is just apply those analytics. And so Some company needs to just go create the software. Ideally, it integrates into the POS so you just literally can

08:34

pop out a report at the end. But even if you don't have integrating with the POS, I think you can even just like look at, oh, how long does someone spend on this menu versus this menu? How are they scrolling? Yeah. What items are being sold before? Would even need to because you're basically so, basically, they scan the QR code, and it's like, you know, Google optimize or optimize it in one of those. You don't enter an AB tax. Then you're gonna pass the the final value. Here's the final cart that they're checking out with to the, you know, to to the thing. And when it's in person

09:02

like, in restaurant.

09:04

Like, they check out, with everything. You know, they they don't, they don't, like, they don't walk away. They actually do order food. So you can kind of, like, bet pretty heavily on that. I wonder if people would also do this with, DoorDash or Uber Eats, like Yes. Could I be a service that just optimizes your DoorDash listing with photos, menus, copy.

09:22

And, like, if you're a national chain that's in, like, you know, whatever thousand cities, and I can get you an extra half a point conversion or extra two dollar, you know, curt size, that's pretty meaningful for for for these, you know, these restaurants that are on on these delivery platforms.

09:37

Yeah. I was thinking about that too because Uber Eats menus are always so long. And, you know, there's like that, what's it called? Whether you have too many options.

09:45

Perilis is my analysis or whatever, like, business needs. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And also Uberates will have three or so items at the top of, like, our most popular items. And I don't know if Uber actually select that for the restaurant, but if you had the option and actually if you're an engineer at Uber working on this, like create a platform where people can AB test, Right. On Uber Eats so that they feel like that's a platform where they're making more money versus DoorDash versus their own, like, that's a value add passed if someone created their own online menu that people ordered from, which would make, obviously, it more sticky for people to stay there. Well, I looked at the startup that was I know this works because I looked at the start that I was doing exactly this. What they were doing was they would go to a local mom and pop restaurant that was like, let's say, Chinese food. And they'd say, great. You know, mister Hans, Chinese, you know, great. You're you're you're

10:33

everybody loves you locally.

10:35

And now you're on DoorDash,

10:36

But, like, your photos are kinda crap. Your, you know, your descriptions are all off. You're not saying what foods are vegan. Even though they are vegan, you're just, you don't list them. Like, you're just not optimized. So what he would do is he would partner with the restaurant, and he would just create

10:50

a shadow, like, a, like, a clone

10:53

of the brand, but he would call it, like,

10:55

You know, like, too too Chinese. Like, it would be like a more, like, catchy name. The all the photos are super bright.

11:02

So it's like, you know, on a backdrop of like orange or red or whatever and like really good looking photos and they would, he would trim the menu down. He'd be like, look, people come in here. They want, like, fried chicken and they want dumplings and they want this and that. And so he would just do, like, this is just these items.

11:16

He wrote better copy. He took better photos, and then it was was when an order gets placed on those restaurants, that same restaurant just gets a ticket. They don't even it's like they don't even know it's like from this other brand, basically. And then later they would send them packaging. That's like, hey, if it comes in through this register, this, like,

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ticket printer,

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put it in the choo choo Chinese, like, box. Don't put it in Mr. Hans, like, you know, like local box.

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And so they just create a separate packaging. So he's like, yeah, we have two hundred restaurants.

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We do, like, you know, seventeen million in GMV,

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and we operate none of these restaurants. They were already restaurants that already existed. All we did was just rebrand them for postmates and Uber Eats and DoorDash.

11:54

And I was like, oh my god. Like, this is like a mind blowing idea that it -- Yeah. -- actually works. He's like, yeah, they love it because they get like thirty percent extra

12:03

revenue just because we're better at marketing on those platforms than they are. And, I would rather do it now. I actually haven't caught up with them. I didn't I didn't end up investing because I was like,

12:11

I don't know where this goes. Like, this is I feel like this could just get, like, banned or blocked in one second, but, like,

12:17

It was a fascinating idea, and that guy was really talented who was doing it. Yeah.

12:22

One more thing on the idea of food. Have you seen that I think it's the FDA. Their food pyramid or at least in Canada, that's what we called it. The food pyramid, and you have, like, all these grains, and they're, like, eat this much bread, and and they're rethinking that. Have you seen that? They're they're re What will they shed like releasing?

12:38

Carbs, the foundation of the diet. Yeah. Yeah. Like fruit was this Thai fruit and vegetables where this, like, they shared a little section. Like, they had bunk beds at the top of the the pyramid. It was crazy.

12:49

Yeah. They were, you know, people got upset because, I mean, a simple example is they'd be like, nuts, no nuts, too much fat. And then they'd be, like, but white bread? Okay. You know, they're foundational. And so, they're coming out with a new food pyramid of sorts and that impacts. I didn't know this, but foods can,

13:06

apply the word healthy to their products. Like, you know, brands, you could, like, actually have the word healthy on your cereal box. As an example,

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based on this food pyramid or some sort of requisites,

13:16

and they're changing that. And I just thought, I don't know if there's a business idea here, but I feel like there's gonna be a ton of content, a ton of changes coming out because of this because, I mean, the food pyramid was pretty foundational. And so I don't know what the business idea here is, but it's just like one of those, there's there's gotta be something here. That's a good inflection. I'll give you another inflection like that that I was thinking about the, like, over the weekend.

13:37

So you know, like, the law change that allows college athletes to monetize their brand, their face called NIL, name and likeness.

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And, so that came into effect this year. And so now college athletes can get paid. For example, when we did MFM Camp. We paid,

13:54

Tough Johnson, this basketball player at North Carolina to come, like, drop in and play pickup with us. It was just a cool moment. It's like, oh, yeah, here's like this guy who's gonna be in the NBA in a couple years. Like, he's just he's just playing with us and we paid him. I don't even know what, like, two hundred dollars or something like that to show up for for an hour, and he's Cool. I got nothing else going on on a Saturday. Like, I'll go pick up two hundred bucks. And by the way, he was an awesome guy.

14:15

He So that's a little like market that's gotten created. And I was like, I was asking Ben. I was like, how did you book him? Like, what did you use? And he's like, I just dm ed him on Instagram.

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And I was like, oh, interesting.

14:25

There's no there's not really a great marketplace yet that's connecting college athletes to the, like, people who wanna pay them for, they're, you know, just to to do an appearance or a sponsorship, whatever. There's some people trying, but no nobody's like, there's gonna be one company that just owns this

14:40

Here's the liquidity. It's like we got all the athletes. And then, like, because of that, we got all the brands, and we take care of all the transactions.

14:47

And you don't need to use Instagram DMs and, like, Venmo, like, it just all happens through platform and we have all the reporting that we hand over to the universities. So I think that's like a big idea is like create AngelList for, like, you know, the NIL marketplace.

14:59

The second thing is just

15:01

what opportunities does this open up. So Dave Portnoy, who who runs Barstool.

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They jumped on this pretty early. They're like, oh, great. We'll have a barstool athlete program where you can sign up to be a bar stool athlete, which will help you get these deals. And,

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they came out there, like, we're taking zero percent cut on these deals. I don't know. How or why, but they just decided to say that. And,

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and he's like, we have two hundred thousand college athletes as part of this now. Some some like huge number like that. That's insane. So I was thinking, I was like, man, so many different products and brands have been built off influencer marketing. Everything from you know, Movement watches, which were, like, early to Instagram, like, influencer marketing and built a hundred million dollar watch brand.

15:41

You know, Sugar Bear hair. You know, they got the Kardashians to be take pictures with this gummy, you know, biting this little blue gummy, and that became like this iconic And then that became, like, again, a hundred million dollar, like, you know, supplements brand. And so now I'm thinking, will all of a sudden overnight you now can tap into the influencer marketing of college athletes across the country.

16:04

And probably very few brands are doing this just yet. And you could almost create a company just working backwards from

16:10

alright. If I could get every influential college athlete to post something,

16:15

What product should I make that's gonna work best with their audience and, like, their trust and all that stuff? Because it's kind of an unsaturated marketing channel right an unsaturated marketing channel right now is, like, worth it can be worth, like, hundred million dollars if you can if you can be the first to figure it out that that platform.

16:31

And so you could kind of think about what products would their audience buy because now I can reach them for a very low cost

16:39

And they this couldn't this literally couldn't happen before. So you have this inflection change. And so I think that's another, like, brainstorm that somebody could do and figure out what product would fit that category and just work backwards from the distribution.

16:51

What would you do? Do you have any thoughts on if you were to choose that as your channel people talk about, like, channel market fit. What what product would you create?

17:00

Well, oh, so so thinking on the e com like, kinda the e commerce side, just for a second, I was like, alright. You can, and I don't know if e commerce is the best. Like, I think probably, like, some credit card or debit card or something like that is probably the best. Like, if you could basically go get

17:14

you know,

17:15

a million people, a million college students to start using your credit card because you got, you know, hundred thousand athletes to just say, like, oh, I'm using this and sign up for this bonus point program and you get a, you know, whatever, five hundred dollar credit for spring break or whatever. I don't know. You should come up with some effort, but you distributed it through these athletes and you basically say, cool. If I if I get at age eighteen to twenty one, somebody to pick my credit card, what's that worth to me? And I think that's probably, like, you know, one of the best categories you could be in. But if it's not that, let's just take e commerce for a second. Like, I think that you want The you find that you would first go to the class of the best e commerce products to, like, high repeat purchase rate, high, like, kind of lock in, basically.

17:57

High margin,

17:58

you know, low shipping. That's why, like native deodorant was such a great product. It weighed less than a pound. So you could ship it in a normal envelope. So shipping was low cost.

18:07

It's repeat purchase because you wear deodorant every day and you run out of it every, whatever, two, three months. And so you're gonna keep buying in.

18:14

It's high margin. Only cost this much to make, and they could charge whatever, twenty bucks to to sell a two pack. And so, like,

18:21

it had a lot of the traits that make for a great product. And so I would try to figure out, like, whether it's like protein powder or, like, athletic greens

18:29

or, you know, like, some, you know, like, barkling water brand or, like, you know, some seltzer. Smelly water? Oh, yeah. Smelly water. I try to figure out some product like that that's like mass appeal high margin, high repeat purchase rate, and then I would just, like, work backwards from that. And I wouldn't do,

18:45

you know, products that are, like, you know, big, one off purchases,

18:49

low peep repress. I just try to stay away from those. So I would go look at the winners of, like, current e commerce,

18:53

and then I would try to, you know, retrofit those and be like, would that, like, particularly hit with a, a college crowd? Like, I think, like, an energy drink would be, like, amazing.

19:03

Like, I think I think if you could do, like, you know, whatever red bull rock star type of thing is, if you could just make like the next the next either, you know,

19:13

vitamin water or or energy drink. I think that's probably the

19:17

the strongest one.

19:19

But if it's not that, then some kind of like subscription product, like maybe deodorant or,

19:24

don't know, something like that. This is probably where I'd go for. Deodorant would work. You could be like, don't smell on the court or some, you know, cheesy thing like that. But, yeah, I think deodorant would actually be you could also, like, just if it's, like, just riffing on that, you could take the deodorant brands and you could, like, make it specific you could make the sense specific to the to the campus. So, like,

19:44

I don't know. Whatever whatever the name, like, you know, you have, like, long horn, you know, whatever for UT, and then you have, like, the names of the sense that, like, kinda fit that market. It's the same scent. You're just labeling it differently depending on where it's at, but you're now pulling into that kinda like brand affinity they already have with their with their campus or whatever else. And it makes sense for the athlete to be promoting that because it's like, again, they're like a college athlete for that school. Maybe you could do some things like that to like choose how, you know, how attractive it is.

20:12

I kinda love that because I I'm just, you know, my marketing hat is on and there's so many tag lines. You could be like sniff out your competitors or like, you know, you'd you could imagine these inner wars of, like, oh, man, that, like, that university sent sucks or that, like, high school. Like, have you smelled that? Like, that stuff's nasty

20:28

or, like, you know, people actually competing on which which college has best set. For every every stick that's bought here, we, you know, drop one stink bomb at your rival school, like,

20:38

some way to, like, you know, compete with the other schools.

20:43

Nice.

20:45

I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot?

20:48

HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application.

20:53

Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases.

20:57

HubSpot grow better.

21:00

Okay. Let's do a quick one, which is I actually saw this in the trends newsletter a while ago. I didn't write this, but,

21:06

It was the stat, which is the average person spends one and a half thousand dollars after a breakup. I have no idea where the stat came from, but

21:15

definitely got the wheels spinning and they came up with a bunch of different ideas, which I think actually are getting some traction.

21:22

Divourse party ideas is something that gets search volume, breakup cake,

21:26

people throwing their own breakup parties. And I was just like,

21:30

I don't know if there's you know, specific brands that are taking this on, but I was like, that that's stuck. One and a half thousand dollars, don't know where it came from. Right. But there's something there.

21:40

That's like if I'm if I'm F Jerry, you know, that, like, Instagram account, and they have these, like, they built a kinda like a little media empire. They have a bunch of other accounts, but they also have products they make. Like, they made that that card game, I think. They they make some product here. If I was if I was one of those accounts, I would be jumping on this. I would basically say, alright. It's already viral. It's meme worthy. It's it's remarkable. People are gonna talk about this. So how do I make, you know, like, the best break up cake delivery service? Or, like,

22:07

you know, like,

22:08

the the revenge body kit. And it's like, you know, we send you this, like, the seven day detox.

22:13

Where you, we can send you, like, a healing stole. We send you, like, a juice, juice cleanse and whatever else to, like, you know, get that person out of your out of your life, you know, get the bad juju you know, away. And I'd be like, you know, this is called bad juju or whatever. And I would just try to create like a viral product through that.

22:29

Because I think it's on brand.

22:31

And I think it has, like, enough demand where there's a you could see this doing, you know,

22:36

two to ten million dollars a year all organic

22:39

just because the product is so viral.

22:42

You know, it's probably not gonna be enormous, but there's a there's enough of a niche there, especially if you're one of these accounts because you already got distribution.

22:49

Or you're somebody who goes to those accounts and partners with them and says, hey, I got the right product for you guys. Let's do, you know, some kind of profit share and, I'll run this business and you guys just help me promote this, like, you know, whatever, like, the breakup vodka. And it's like, you know, this is the breakup vodka kit or whatever, you know, whatever the thing is. Yeah. I mean, I'm imagining, you know, all the tropes of someone gets broken up with and they become super fit and like they get a PhD and they just become like the best version of themselves after the breakup doesn't always happen, but you could imagine something like that. Here it is. Even less work. It's like, what's those what are those like voodoo dolls where you, like, poke it? And you're like, you're sending, like, ill will towards them. You could just, like, upload a photo of your person. We print you a doll that looks, you know, like, close enough like them, and, like, you can do that.

23:35

That reminds me of, did you see that startup empty? It was fake. Did you did you hear about this? It it's I think it was you know, had the silly spelling to. It was like e m p t I or something,

23:46

and it was a fake startup that people thought was real. And basically, they sent people these empty boxes

23:53

and the whole idea was like, look, we send you these empty boxes, and there's some, like, motivational

23:58

quote from Buddha in it, and it's like, you know, rid yourself of all the things you don't need in your life. And the idea is that people are supposed to take all their junk, put it in these boxes, and send it to this company for free. But they pay this company to send them these boxes.

24:12

But it was a fake startup and all these people are writing about it. They're like, oh, this is so smart. Like, what a cool company and it was just it. Yeah. Exactly. It was a joke. But Yeah. Actually, you could do that with this too. You could send them the break up box. It's like, put all their crap in this. All their crap they've left in your house that reminds you of them. Put it in send it to us, and we will send you a video of us, like, burning this box in this, like, epic way. And, like, you get to have that at the end. That's, you know, those are the types of of ideas you could do with this. Nice. So you were right before we started recording, you were starting to tell me you go. Here's my theory of why people like this podcast. And what is your theory?

24:46

Okay. So there are many reasons to love my first million.

24:50

I think there's something that you guys have done especially recently when you and Sam just go back and forth

24:56

and You tell a really funny joke, and then Sam just starts laughing hysterically,

25:00

like, in a contagious way that, most people would hold back maybe on a podcast, but it's it's literally as people say, like, you're in the room with him. And it reminded me of this subreddit I found recently called r slash contagious laughter.

25:14

Four point five million people subscribed to this, and it's one of, I think, the top hundred subreddits out there. And it's literally just a feed of people laughing.

25:22

And there's there's dozens of posts every day. And I I was just as I went down it, I was like, there's gotta be a post of Sam and Sean who's here.

25:31

Well, okay. Let me tell you a couple interesting things about this. First, I think this must I think this subreddit must be kind of like almost like new or growing faster

25:39

recently. Right? Because I heard of this subreddit before, and I kinda keep an eye on on the top ones. Maybe I just missed it. But I've also seen this trend on TikTok. I don't know if you've seen it. Somebody will be like, I'm a clinical psychologist and I can make you happier in the next ten seconds.

25:54

Fuck. Repeat after me. And there's like a duet so that guy's like, he's just like,

25:59

Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

26:00

Uh-huh. And you're just like, okay. I see where this is going. And then she just gets, like,

26:04

and, like, by the end, both people are just cracking up, like, because it's, like, ten deep. And, you can't help yourself. Like, the body will just start, like, genuinely laughing just from making the sound. Like, it goes both ways. Not like, something funny happens. Therefore, I break out laughing. It's like, if you break out laughing intentionally,

26:22

you could just, like, it could it's like something funny just happened, basically.

26:26

And, Yeah. And so I've thought about this, like, contagious laughter thing in two ways. One is

26:31

as it I was thinking about the podcast, and I was like, was watching I was watching the All Land pod,

26:37

and,

26:39

I love that podcast, but they do something that really bothers me, which is one of them will crack a joke, And the other guys don't, what I call, sell the joke. Like, they don't laugh.

26:49

And I don't know if they don't laugh because they're trying to They're, a, they don't think it's funny, b, it's not that they're trying to keep it serious, or c, they might just edit it where they just don't use the audio track from someone because it kind of makes it a little choppy because you're using one on top of the other.

27:04

But -- Mhmm. -- it totally changes the vibe of something when,

27:08

in a podcast, especially when the other person actually sells your

27:12

jokes. Like, if you if you try to crack something and I go with it, or and this works for for other things on my first meal too. I call it the homie move where Sam will be like, Do you know how many people buy this thing? And I know it's probably a high number if he's telling me like that, but I'll be like, I don't know what, like, like, a hundred. And just to give them the, like, No, dude. A million. And, like, I give them that, like, assist, basically.

27:33

And so there are several things like that where you gotta kinda sell

27:36

the other person's thing. And it's not fake. It's just, like,

27:40

be expressive,

27:41

like, laugh hard, react big, That stuff works when it comes to content, and people are very shelled up about that sort of thing.

27:49

I don't know if that that is in line with what you're talking about. Totally.

27:53

One of the funniest moments on my first million was your Orlando Bloom story, which I think if I just heard you telling it by yourself, I'd be like, yeah, that's pretty funny. But Sam's laughter layered onto that where he was you could just tell he was dying as you were telling that story. Just made it honestly top five moments on my first million history for me, but that's why I think this subreddit is so great. Even in their roles or their like community guidelines,

28:16

You know how someone posts something and there's typically a bot that says, hey, report this if x y and zed. On that subreddit, it's like, report this if you're laughing at a joke were some sort of incident and not the laughter specifically. They're like, we only want you to be on here to hear other people laughing. So I don't know. I just thought that was like a fun a fun thing and reminded me of why I think some people love my first million. It's just so authentic.

28:41

Well, you're you're about to do a podcast. And do you remember what I told you, my advice you when it came to to doing a podcast. I don't know if you remember this. This was a couple years ago now. I actually don't. You should tell me that. I was like,

28:53

Don't be too normal. Or I was like, you're too normal. I was like, you need to be, Yeah. Like, to me, the ideal podcast guest is, like, half insane.

29:02

And and what that means is, like, there's things that they're not even aware of that are instant. Like, Sam has a ton of these, where he's like, dude. I was thinking that, you know, you know, you think about, like, what happens if someone broke in right behind me right now tried to kill me. I'm like, no. I I don't think that. The fact that you think I think that means you're kinda insane. You're not even aware of that. That's a weird thing you're doing. You think that other people do that too. And then the second is, like, being willing to say something crazy stuff like that. And then the third is, like, they don't hedge,

29:30

and, like, try to downplay. Like, most people are are basically taking their own little volume knob. And turning it down all the time, because they wanna fit in. And so the best thing you could do if you wanna be a personality on the internet is, like, you can't have that. I'm trying to fit in turn the volume down thing. You gotta, like, turn it up, if anything.

29:47

And so that was my theory on it. Now I do think I might be wrong because, like, there's people like Lex Friedman or whoever who are successful with their podcast and, like,

29:54

you know,

29:55

it's like, you know,

29:57

Lex has not they his volume is, like, down to two, basically. He's very

30:01

monotone,

30:02

like, calm, normal person. And people people do end up loving it. So I I don't think my theory was was entirely correct. But I do think it helps to have, like, you know, bit of a screw loose and, like, you know, you're a very stable smart person. You don't have that much of a screw loose. I think you're almost playing from behind, when it comes to internet content.

30:21

No. I think you're right. I so in preparing for every episode that I do, I go and listen to that person on other podcasts. And it's crazy how they get asked the exact same questions everywhere they go because they're just kind of a template of like, okay. So tell me about your life. Like, tell me why you went this direction in your career. And I think you even talked about this on my first million. You're like, we don't do that. We we ignore all the questions that we know everyone's gonna ask. I guess maybe some people wanna hear, but we ask you, like, the real stuff, like, how much do you make? Like, what keeps you up at night? Like,

30:52

when have you failed or, like, even more than that, you actually just ask the questions that people probably wanna hear. Yeah. There's this there's a great thing that happens. If you always ask questions like that, you it's like a get out of jail free card. It's like, well, that's just what he does versus if you just try to spring them on one person, it's something like it's a little intrusive there. But it's like, oh, that's his stick. That's the that the show stick. Like, that's what they do.

31:16

Then you can get away with being a little more blunt. And so,

31:20

you know, cultivating like an image of being,

31:23

you know, a sort of a don't give an f slash blunt personality has all these advantages because people just create new rules for you. They're like, ah, you know, if a normal person did this, yeah, I would feel wrong, but That's that's just Sean being Sean. That's just Sam being Sam, man. You're like, whoa, okay.

31:39

And I just get to be that. That's awesome. That is awesome. Wow. Okay. That's good. Let's keep going. What else you got? Cheating scandals. Everyone's talking about it. Just poker fishing. I even saw Irish dance in a newsletter recently. So every you know, cheetings everywhere, but, Well, if people are out of the loop, frame it frame it for them about what what what are what other controversies?

31:59

Okay. So I don't know all of them in-depth, but been following the chess one pretty closely. Magnus Carlsen, World Chess champion, played Hans Niemann several weeks ago.

32:08

Neiman beat him, but then there was this controversy after where,

32:12

Magnus was acting sketchy and then eventually came out with this statement saying, Hey, I believe Hans cheated.

32:19

I can't speak to exactly why. And then there has been a history of Hans cheating in the past as well. So there's all of these people on the internet who are taking sides and saying, no, Hans has been really good? How could you cheat over the board? And then there's people who believe in Carlsen and are like, no. He's had a history of cheating. We just don't know how. And then there's been a similar poker controversy and then a fishing one where if they were stuffing fish with like lead balls. And so I think a bunch of people have just, you know,

32:46

become fascinated with this idea that, oh my gosh, people are cheating even though they have been for a long time.

32:52

But, I have a couple ideas around the idea of cheating, but I first wanna hear your take. Like, what what do you think about these cheating scandals?

32:59

Well, there's something very

33:01

seductive about them. I don't know about you, but, like, I don't follow chess normally. But and it came to this. I was like, goddamn it. If I don't have to get to the bottom of this, like,

33:11

you know, here goes four hours of, like, YouTube rabbit holing to figure out, and and I don't it's not even, like, it's a better entry point for me than just this person was great, or this was a great match. It's like, here's the controversy. Oh, what is it? Right? And it goes back to this thing that, I remember Dana White said once Dana White's the president of the UFC.

33:29

And he goes,

33:31

I go they were like, you know, UFC is kind of a fringe small thing, but you're saying it's gonna be huge. Why do you believe that? He goes, I believe that because If you go to a park or a playground right now, and you got a basketball court, people are playing basketball. You got a football field, people are playing football. You soccer over here. Baseball over there.

33:49

And then somebody screams fight. And there's a fight going on. Guess where everybody's heads turning to the fight. And that was his whole thesis of, like, why I think the UFC is gonna be big because fighting is this universal

34:00

universal thing that just gets you to turn your neck, whether you wanted to or not And it's actually kind of played out. The UFC become this global sport, you know, a five billion dollar plus company.

34:10

And,

34:12

and it succeeded in places where, you know, like, football doesn't really translate into Europe or Asia, but fighting does. Fighting, you know, like, there's Chinese the Chinese viewership is big in the UFC was Russian and so was, you know, wherever every little country. So

34:27

I think controversy is kind of the same thing, where, like, wasn't that into chess until I found out that there might be this, like, scandal. What's the scandal? I gotta know.

34:35

And,

34:36

and then you look at the evidence and you're, like, Well, there's two kind of like interesting components. One is, like, how did how would somebody cheat? That's kind of interesting. It's sort of like a, oceans eleven. Like, how did they rob the bank type of thing?

34:47

Because, you know, you're sitting there in a chessboard.

34:50

It's not online. So, you know, this guy had been he had been caught cheating online, admitted to cheating online, And many people cheat online to basically have a program running because, you know, AI can play chess better than a human can.

35:02

But then you have, how was he cheating over the board? And there was this then somebody threw out this crazy, theory, which was the anal beads. Yeah. He's got anal beads, you know, basically up his butt to vibrate and tell him, you know, to what move to make or whatever. And so,

35:15

and and and the way that Magnus did it kinda added to it. So he first

35:20

When he got beat, it was big news, because Magnus is the greatest player in the world, maybe the greatest player of all time.

35:26

He then goes online and he tweets out this thing like,

35:30

he'd treat out, like, a meme or a quote from a soccer coach who was like, you know, I can't if I say what I wanna say, I'll get in trouble. And people are like, what is he trying to say?

35:39

Then he comes out with a statement saying, I think he cheated.

35:41

Then he plays him again

35:44

and one move or two moves into the match. He just resigns. He basically quits and walks away.

35:50

Again, sort of like saying I'm not gonna play with this cheater. And, and so some people are like, is this just sour grapes? And other people are no. He knows something, but he's not said why he thinks he's cheating yet. And then over time Probably because he doesn't know. Right? Well, not Like, I don't think magnets can He he thinks that Hans cheated, but he doesn't know how, and that's probably why he hasn't been descriptive about it because he's like, I think this guy's cheated. There's two pieces of evidence.

36:15

One is just he says

36:17

he didn't look like he was trying. Like, the guy beat me. I'm the greatest player in the world, and I know what it looks like when people try to beat me, they're very focused and concentrated.

36:25

He barely looked like he was paying attention yet he played basically a perfect game and beat me. That was his first thing. It was just like, I didn't feel like he tried and he beat me.

36:32

So that was the first piece of evidence. And then the second was people went back and looked at all of his, like, past games as he ranked up because he's had, like, this crazy

36:41

rise from, like, you know, a normal great player to, like, Grand Master or whatever top ranked player. And they and they did this thing where they basically can put your game history back in this, like, chess solver engine

36:52

and see

36:53

how close to perfect? How close to AI did you play? And, like, the greatest players of all time have played, like,

37:00

sixty two or seventy two percent of their moves matched, you know, like, what the AI would do, like, perfect moves. And he's had, like, several, get many games where he's at a hundred percent. And, like, the greatest players ever miss will have, like, no games at a hundred percent during their, like, rise to the top. And so it's sort of fishy on that front. Like, you know,

37:18

Really, this guy's making, like, hundred percent

37:21

game theory optimal moves, and the greatest players ever are at best or, like, at seventy percent. And so That those are the kind of pieces of evidence against him. But still, nobody knows how he did it if he if he is indeed cheating.

37:35

Yeah. Exactly. So I used to play chess competitively as a kid, and both of those are very compelling arguments. The first one, especially, like, if you've ever played chess across the board, If you're in a tough situation, certainly if you're playing the world chess champion,

37:48

you are concentrating so hard. I think there's stats that say, like, you know, a full chess match can burn like a thousand calories or whatever if you're sitting at the board for several hours. And so I think that's really compelling.

37:59

My question is, a, How do you prove that someone's cheating? I don't know if you can. I think you can prove someone has the intent to cheat if you catch them with, like, yep, some anal beads or something in their shoe.

38:09

But how do you actually prove that someone has cheated? And then I'm also curious to know how these, you know, like the chest federation, etcetera. How are they going to change the way they operate

38:20

to catch this shooting in the future. I don't I don't know. I guess they make people walk through metal detector, but,

38:26

But there's always, you actually came to actionable.

38:28

Right? Yeah. You you can always do the next things that's, like, and I'm not gonna get caught. Once you know, it's just like, you know, in the Olympics, you have USana or Wada, who, basically, the agencies that are supposed to catch you from doping. But what happens is

38:40

guys go to the Olympics. They test clean. They break all the records.

38:43

And, they're a natural athlete. And then six years later,

38:47

Wanna updates their tests so they can test for new stuff.

38:50

That's new to them. But the athlete had it all along, and then they go back to Tesla samples, and they're like, oh, turns out they were doping. Right? And this has happened like a few times in in the Olympics and in high level sports. And so there's this problem of, like, it's this cat and mouse game between cheaters and the and the sort of like the anti cheat, but anti cheat is actually a really interesting business like category. So I didn't really know much about this until

39:14

We started building a startup that was in the gaming space. This was the company that ended up getting acquired by Twitch, but when we were building in this space, we would play games in the office just refunded. If they Fortnite, played overwatch, played a bunch bunch of different games like that. And,

39:28

and then you you sort of see things. One is like, wow, the importance of, like,

39:32

this sort of hand eye coordination aim, basically being able to aim and shoot, in these games is like critical. And then there's, like, you'll play somebody and you're like, oh my god. Like, as soon as I peek around the corner,

39:43

boom, I get head shot immediately perfectly one time every time by the same guy. And it's like, Oh, it's an aim bot. It's like, basically, somebody's using a, basically, like, a piece of software that will automatically just aim for your head every single time more than a human can do. And so then the games have all these anti cheat mechanisms built in to prevent that because it's, I mean, ruins the game when you have,

40:03

when you have cheaters. And so, at the highest levels. And these games now have, like, a really big competitive scene, e sports. Like, they have to figure out how to catch this. And so you have a software game and then you have software anti cheat, which is different than, like, the Olympics or this, like, chess metal detector thing where it's a it's an offline game. Now you did offline offline anti cheat. And so I think that the offline world needs to sort of learn more from

40:26

the gaming world about anti cheat because there there's these companies that are quite big that are anti cheat providers to all games, because each game individually can't build the security system that's gonna stop every, you know, potential form of cheating. And so there's just individual companies that are like, we are anti cheat software. Every game becomes our customer and we can use them. And so I think that's what's gonna have to happen, which is that you're gonna have to have,

40:51

like, anti cheap companies

40:53

that are security systems, basically, for the for the competitive integrity of the games. And I think chess and poker and, you know, fishing and others are gonna have to, like, ramp up in area.

41:04

But the irony is this is the best thing that's ever happened, though. It's the best thing since Queen's Gambit. Right? You know, more attention than ever,

41:10

on these things.

41:12

Yeah. I mean, there's like conspiracy theories, which is like Hans and Magnus are in this together and, like, they're they're associated with chess dot com, and they're all doing this to just like hype up chess, which I don't think is true, but I mean, it's kinda crazy when you think about fishing, for example. How was the fact that there was leadballs in a fish not caught earlier? I mean, I think you're right that some of these in person sports are just like way behind on the concept of cheating, which is ancient.

41:38

So I'm I'm interested to see how that progresses, but one idea,

41:41

like you said, there's gonna be this wave of measures that needs to be put in place. And I just thought of this this thing that I saw you guys have had Peter levels on the podcast before

41:51

And he had so nomad list is one of his companies. And for ages, people kept trying to copy nomad list. There's all these companies where, like, we're gonna hire ten engineers, and we're gonna like, smash you. Right? Cause you're one engineer and and we're just gonna take all your data. And he would just for fun, put in fake data. So there was this country or city that he put in called Dorabo.

42:12

And he would just do that to be like, who copied my data set?

42:16

Just to see. Which I kinda loved. And I am I was trying to think through how that maybe could be applied elsewhere.

42:22

I don't know if it could be applied to chess, but you could imagine, like, what if Stockfish just had just had like a couple incorrect moves -- Right. -- that would catch the cheater. It's like, oh, you played g four. You were not supposed to play g four. If you were a great player, you would know otherwise. And I just wonder what other kind of

42:39

spoofs or, like, tricks you could put in as anti cheating measures? Well, there oh, I don't know if you saw this,

42:44

was looking at I was on Twitter this morning, and I saw that Elon had tweeted,

42:48

at somebody, this story. I thought it was pretty interesting.

42:51

So Somebody tweeted at Elon, they go, hey, Elon, back in the day, you had this, two thousand eight, I think. There was somebody was leaking internal company data.

43:00

And, they kept leaking it to news outlets. It was bad for business, and then you found them. I'm curious, how did you find them when it when it had happened? And he goes, actually, it's an interesting story because normally Elon's tweets are just memes, but he's like, actually, it's an interesting story. We sent everybody in the company the same email, but with

43:16

one slightly different space somewhere in the email.

43:20

So like we would, you know, between this period, we would either do two spaces or one space. But it was a long email, and so we were able to create, like, a unique fingerprint

43:28

for everybody in the company. We sent them all a slightly unique,

43:32

email that was, like, sort of, like, binary proof that this was your email that got out. And he's like, so we found the person that way, you know, we caught them sort of immediately. It was the fastest path to catching them versus

43:42

going through all the email, like, servers and, like, padding people down as they leave the leave the the the factory. Like, how are we gonna find this person? And that was the best way to do it was to put out something juicy that was false, space out the thing differently, and then they caught the person immediately. And he's like, you know, that we we, you know, we asked them to pursue career in another company. Like, you know, we will be glad to go. That's why I'm saying

44:03

it. Yeah. That's so clever. Yeah. So I'm interested to see how this progresses because I do wonder it's like who who wins? Do the cheaters win? Do the anti cheating measures win? Historically, I mean, in gaming, what was the case? Like, could the anti cheating measures keep up with the cheaters?

44:20

No. Like, the the best cheaters always one step ahead because, you know, there's always a the the bigger the the more money involved the bigger the incentive

44:27

to cheap. Mhmm. And so you're anytime you have a big pot of money, you're gonna find people are gonna cheat. And this is why, you know, PayPal and Facebook and others, they have so much so much staff every day dedicated just to catching Cheers.

44:39

And, because there's a huge amount of money involved in it. This is why people love Bitcoin. They're like, wow. If somebody could have hacked this or spoof this or have done a double spend, there is a literally, like, half a trillion dollar prize

44:51

for the taking. And the because it hasn't, that just shows you how secure this is. So it's like the absence of a hack shows a security. And so with with anywhere there's a lot of money, there's gonna be an incentive to cheat. And there's always and the the hardest part is that it's usually not sophisticated. So for example, in the have you if you follow the poker one that's been going on? Mhmm. It's like this

45:10

This,

45:11

like high stakes game in LA that they stream the game. And so they have like a twitch channel or whatever where they're streaming like, kinda, like, the world series of poker but just going on all the time. People are playing for, like, each person has, like, a hundred or three hundred thousand dollars on the table. So you get these pots of, like, half a million dollar pots.

45:27

And

45:28

this girl makes this, this woman's playing this hand and she plays it in a way that kinda makes no sense. She has Jack four off suits and doesn't make any sense. Why you would even be in the hand?

45:37

The board has no jacks, no fours,

45:39

and it has a flush draw, has a straight draw. The other guy has both.

45:43

And he bets, he bets. She, you know, she calls it all in when she has nothing

45:47

and she wins the hand.

45:49

And people are like, there is no way you can make that call. Like, there's no you're holding those cards. There's no the only explanation is you look cards wrong, and you you thought you had something else. But she kind of like if you read the audio is there too where she's like, no, I don't have it. Right? She's basically saying I don't have, like, do you have a three? She's like, no, I don't have a three.

46:07

And so she's, basically, she's like, oh, you know, I just did this as a bluff catcher. And literally, the guy's face when she calls, At first, she's like, oh, you got me. I didn't have it. You caught my bluff. But then she turns over her cards and he's like, okay, you caught my bluff, but you caught my bluff with that. That makes

46:22

zero sense that you would ever try to even catch a bluff with that. And he's literally stone faced for, like, a minute and a half. He doesn't say anything.

46:30

He's just looking and his eyes are just moving between the table and her. And he's like, you could tell the computer and his brain is, like, breaking. It's like there's no way this could have happened. He is detected

46:41

basically an an anomaly, an an anomalous move that has to be something like cheating. Like, there's no other explanation as how how somebody can make, you know, a two hundred thousand dollar bet on what the with those cards, unless you knew what my cards were and what's coming out. And so,

46:58

And so they, like, launched this investigation and, like,

47:01

I think Reddit and YouTube are great at that where they, like, crowdsource the investigation. They're, like, finding old clips more, like, more than any police officer could do. You know, put Reddit on the case. It's like when they found the the Boston bomber or whatever. I don't know if that ended up being true. But, like, it's the same idea. And so they're showing, basically, what it looks like happened was just There's a human in prod in the production team who was probably feeding her the information,

47:23

and she had like a vibrator device on her, like, in her pocket or in her pants or something like that. That was, like, signaling her just like, if it vibrates, that means you're good.

47:32

Like, call the bet. If it doesn't vibrate, that means you don't have you're not winning full And,

47:37

that's what people think is the, like, sort of most likely explanation for this at this point, but that's hard because it's human engineering. And, like,

47:45

there's this

47:46

conference that happens every year. I forgot the name of it, but you you might know. It's in Vegas. And it's like the hacker conference. I don't know if you've heard it's like def con or something like that. The it's like

47:55

Oh, that's familiar. Yeah. It's basically it's the number one, like, hacker con hacker convention. Like, you know, like, I don't know why anybody would go to this. Like, you know, walking into a, you know, a shark den, basically.

48:05

But one thing that they showed, I I kind of went down this rabbit hole of, like, what are they talking about at this thing? And one thing they showed is just how much of, like,

48:13

hacks is not, like, brilliant computer engineering. It's somebody just calling you And being like, hey, I'm just verifying some information with the bank here. Could you just tell me your mother's maiden name and your date of birth and your last four of your social? Alright. Thank you. You're confirmed. Nothing else to worry about. And then they just take that and they call the bank and they say, Hey, I need to change my password. Can you change it for me? I forgot what my old one is, but, you know, oh, my security questions. Yeah. My mother's maiden name is this, and here's my last four, and then they get the patch change to take all your money. And it's they didn't hack in the system. They just literally, like, they catfished you. Right? They they sort of, like, the the, you know, human engineering. They basically just, like,

48:47

trick you into giving up information. And that's how a lot of the big hack happen is they just trick a human into giving them their password. And then they don't need to break in. It's like, you gave me the keys. Can just walk right in. Exactly. That's why Sim swapping is, like, one of the,

49:00

unfortunately, super common ways of hacking people because people will go into like an AT and T and be like, Hey, I'm this person. This is my phone number. I lost my SIM. Could you give me a new one? And they just get that. And so yeah, It's it definitely humans are the, like, faulty piece in the operation. There's a great business that came out of this insight, which was There's many of them now. But but when I heard this, I remember thinking, oh my god, that is genius.

49:24

It's basically a business that goes to companies, and they say, hey,

49:27

the number you know, that ninety percent of these hacks happen just because your your employees gonna just type their password on the wrong page. And they're like, I guess that's true. Yeah. Go. So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna send false phishing emails to your employees.

49:40

And,

49:41

but don't worry, like, you know, when they type it in, we're just gonna give you a report every month. Cause you're paying for a contract, which is just to say this employee, click this link,

49:49

and this would have been a breach. But thankfully, we caught it. You can now educate the employees better. And we, you know, this is a way to, like, you know, make sure that your your employees are not gonna fall for this. And,

50:00

and those companies do extremely well because it's way cheaper

50:04

to, like, prevent the hack that way just by having somebody kind of stress test your employees in that way, try to break through the system and just say, hey, here's where we found a vulnerability.

50:14

And, I I thought that was just like a genius business category to be in. Yeah. I I have a coworker that fell for one recently. And she's like, oh, man, I gotta do this training. But I was like, really, that's all we have to do. We just gotta do a little bit of training. Like, this seems pretty faulty if all these employees are clicking on this. But I kinda love the idea of ethical hacking. Have you seen there's been someone recently? I think their their code name or their hacker name is like Biorxka or something. And they've hacked into three of Indonesia's,

50:40

like, large government databases.

50:43

And at first, people are like, oh, man, this is Indonesia is a huge country, right, in terms of population. They're like, oh, they've got like millions, hundreds of millions of records the first time. And then the second time, they were like, my gosh. It's happened again. Like this person has way too much data, but by the third time they were like, this person is just exposing how fragile all of our systems are because they haven't sent the data anywhere. They're just like, you guys,

51:05

you have to fix this. And they're just like using proof to show it instead of saying, you know, going to people and tweeting like our systems are really

51:13

insecure or whatever. Instead, they're just like, let me just show you. And I think it's I mean, I think have you heard of WIS? I think that's like enter some sort of enterprise security software,

51:23

was the fastest at least one of the fastest that hit a hundred million ARR recently, like faster than deal, faster than a lot of the companies that we're familiar with.

51:32

Yeah. Just w I z. Right? I think that's the the name of it -- Yes. -- with Cloud Security. Yeah. Exactly.

51:37

Yeah. They had they came out with some I've never heard of this company. It's like, hey. We're the fastest growing company in what exactly.

51:44

And they do. Is this what they do? They do the, sort of, like, bug bounty stuff. Yeah. A hundred million ARR in eighteen months.

51:51

I don't know exactly what they do, but I just know there's some sort of enterprise security software and, yeah, they're, like, quietly the big, the biggest, fastest, or not the biggest, the fastest growing company in a while. Yeah. That's insane. Alright. Enough,

52:03

enough hacking and cheating and stealing,

52:06

although I do I just I love that stuff. I can't get enough. Love a controversy. I know. Same. Let's do these internet portfolios. So I think these are these are pretty cool. I I think these are good inspo for people, and you've curated a group of them. Let me let me just kinda set which is basically

52:21

people have these kind of like,

52:23

personal websites, portfolios.

52:25

And I think you you you wrote something on this doc. I want you to explain. You wrote evidence greater than greater than greater than confidence.

52:33

So what does that what does that mean? And then why do these interest you? Yeah. So I think in the age of social media, especially, it's like really easy for you to be seen as an expert in something. You know, someone who's done no can look up a bunch of Wikipedia articles and start tweeting threads on it and a bunch of people who don't know any better can just say, oh, wow. This person has a lot of confidence. Right. And, you know, that's fine. But what I think is important, especially in this era where everyone can seem like an expert is evidence of evidence over confidence. And what do I mean by evidence? It's like, don't tell me you're this business expert. Show me the businesses that you've built and how successful they are and how you built them. Or let me see how you built them instead of you telling me how you built them. And I think one version of this for individuals

53:16

are these personal portfolio sites. So, you know, you can have a site, which again, it's like, I've written for fortune and I have this many followers on Twitter or you know, all of these things that you've made up that tell people you're confident instead of how about you just show me your skills? And some of these portfolios, which will

53:33

hopefully pull up here, are just really fascinating because as soon as I go to them, I'm like, this person is a badass. I wanna hire them just based on what I see here based on the evidence that they are a killer creator. And so we should pull some of them up, but for example, pull up this one from bruno Simon. And tell me what you see. So, basically,

53:52

it's bruno

53:53

hyphen simon dot com. And you land, and it's literally a, like, jeep that's on the screen. You you click start and there's a jeep that's on the screen, and it says use your keys to move around. And it's just like, and you just, like, you can you can go forward. You can just, like, drive into stuff. It's like a three d. It's basically a game.

54:11

And it's like his resume almost, but

54:14

You can basically drive around crashing to stuff. And, like, clearly this person is, like, super talented,

54:19

artist,

54:19

creative,

54:21

web developer type of person. It's, like, Alright. I'm gonna drive to the projects section.

54:26

And like, okay, I'm in the project section, and I could see there are different things. If I park my car on the open

54:31

on the on the parking spot there, it'll open that, like, you know,

54:35

that link to go see that website that they built.

54:38

This is Amazing. Like, this is one of the best

54:42

portfolios I've ever seen. Like, this is, like, stunning.

54:46

Yeah. It's pretty awesome.

54:47

Pull up,

54:48

another one, which is just another example. Click the one that says interactive resume

54:53

from Robbie Leonardi.

54:56

A Robbie. Okay. Oh my god. It's like, basically, if you game a Mario, so there's a character and I'm scrolling. And all of a sudden, I'm like, okay. Level one, that's his about.

55:05

Oh, wow. This is cool.

55:07

This is sick. It's basically, like, a chart of, like, oh, I'm good at design, illustration, whatever, but it's, like, I'm running through the level, and I'm, like, learning these different about the person, about what they're into. Okay. NBA fan. Oh my god. Now I'm underwater.

55:19

I'm doing the underwater level.

55:21

Yeah. So this is crazy. They basically just took a resume, designed it beautifully, and made it play like a Mario Mario game. And at the end of the level, it's like, contact me here. Wanna work with me or whatever, you know, here's my contact form. You you've won. You've made it to the end of the level.

55:36

You've won. The thing I love about this is I assume these people are not applying for jobs, but can you imagine if you had a job opening and you had like a hundred typical resumes people being like, yeah, I've worked here for three years. I've done this. I have this degree. And then one of them was this. How could you not hire this person? How could you So I made a crappy version of this. When I applied for so when I moved to Silicon Valley, I did this. So basically, I

56:01

I applied to two jobs when I wanted to move to Silicon Valley. I I applied to Stripe, and I applied to a place called monkey inferno. Stripe, everybody knows. Turned into, like, you know, whatever, hundred billion dollar company.

56:11

I would have been, like, employee, I don't know, like, thirty five forty at the time. So it would have been great. It would have probably made, like, ten, thirty million dollars, something like that just as I can mid level

56:22

sales biz dev type guy that I was gonna join as. Unfortunately, I crashed and burned in the interview when he was like, sell me this pen. And I was like, and I just fumbled it somewhere.

56:33

But the,

56:34

the other job I applied to is monkey Ferno, and monkey Ferno was a really cool company. And one thing that's interesting is the more

56:41

the company shows that they're unique, the more you sort of get the vibe and you're like, okay. I can read the room. You're cool and unique, and you appreciate like a, you know, creativity and a sense of humor. So that's how I'm gonna apply. So I didn't send in a resume. I just made a website. And I, you know, I can't code. I'm not, like, you're way more technically talented. Let alone these people who are like, you know, freaking

57:00

you know, they're creating, like, you know, fake Mario game as a resume.

57:03

But I made a basic website that was basically and I just sent an email. I tried to copyright it well. I was like, you know, My first line of the email was like,

57:11

you know, hey, Michael.

57:13

I'm applying for the, you know, I saw your drill role for product manager.

57:17

And even though, you know, I have none of the qualifications you're looking for, let me explain to you why I'm the man for the job. And, like, you know, I think that was, like, get his attention to read the next thing just to be like, is this guy, you know, a complete clown or, like, is there something here? And so I wrote this email and then I said, you know, I rather than add a, you know, resume to the stack of resumes, like, I made a website for you. And so I my re my website wasn't about me. It was like, Why I should work at monkey and fern. So it was, like, more tailored,

57:43

to him. And I had these same things. I had this, like, skills chart but I included stuff that I wasn't good at. I was, like, hard work. I was, like,

57:51

forty percent. Like, you know, that was, like, one of my lowest skills. I was, like, yeah, I'm kinda lazy actually.

57:56

You know, I I'm kinda lazy. I can't force myself to do things that I don't love to do. But I gave him, like, things. And then in the interview, like, I remember one of the guys was, like, Why would you apply for a job and write your hard work is not high? And I was like, well, I'm glad you asked. I can explain. Here's here's what I think about that. And, and so I had this whole thing, and I kind of wrote a resume exactly for them. I was like, you know, here's some of the mottos. Here's, like,

58:18

I looked at your companies. Here's some of the things I think I could do for them. And so I kinda tailored it to that. And I remember he later told me he was like, you know, if you hadn't done that website. Like, there's no way we would've hired you because

58:30

on paper, you had, like, literally none of the qualifications we were looking for. Like, the entire job description was, like, just not you.

58:36

But,

58:37

that website was really cool. It was really unique. Nobody else had done something like that. And so it just made me feel like we gotta talk to this guy. And so that was like the the in that got me got me the job in the in the end in the end. Yeah. I mean, I think I've hired a decent amount now, and there's so many people who mass apply to jobs, and they're like, yeah, I I'm interested in this job, and I have the qualifications, but the times I've been really impressed is, like, you can tell someone really wants to work there. And has done their research. And you know the second they get in, you almost don't have to train them on the company. You probably have to train them on other things, but you know they understand exactly what you're trying to do because they've been following your company or your team or your people for a while. So I think that's that's spot on. Right. Let's do a couple of couple of these other ones. So, Yeah. Let's rapid fire through some of this. The meal the meal dot fun one, I think I've talked about before on here. This one's awesome.

59:26

So it needs it's m e a l dot fun. But I don't know if you could pull it up. But basically, it's like, it's it's just like the headline is a tiny website on the internet. And then he's basically got a bunch of little, like,

59:38

interactive little projects that he's made that you could do. And I I remember I went through the absurd trolley problems one,

59:45

which is basically like

59:47

if you've remember in school where it's like, you know, there's a train on the tracks that's gonna, you know, kill five people But you can pull the switch and just kill this one. Would you do it? And you're like, yeah, I guess I'd rather kill one than five. I think I would do it. And then it basically, like, changes it to, like, but the one is a baby. Would you do it? And you're like, no, I wouldn't kill the baby. And then it's like,

01:00:04

it's like, okay. But the other one is five cats. Would you do five cats? And it's It just takes you through thirty, like, absurd variations

01:00:12

of that of that question. And and each one, when you say yes or no, it says seventy four of people agree with you, twenty six percent disagree. There's been two point one million votes of this. And you're like, wow, that's, like, that's cool. You can see where do you differ from, like, you know, the masses when it comes to these things. And so that's the one I did. Are there any other cool ones that he's got here?

01:00:30

Well, I mean, he has so many. I'll call it a couple. So it feels like he just took all of his curiosities, which are the same curiosities that many people have, and turn them into these, yeah, internet games of sorts. So one of them is, like, explore the scale of space or

01:00:45

see who was alive in x year. You're like, I wonder who was alive in eighteen seventy. And you can kinda see what,

01:00:50

famous people or influential people were alive at the same time. Another one that's fun is the internet's greatest debates. So it's all these questions like, you know, is it GIF or GIF or I can't remember what some of the other ones are, but he gets the internet to vote on them. Right. So you actually, you know, you get the answer to the internet's greatest questions. But as you can see, if people are watching on screen, there's just so many that he's built. Like, this one where it's like design the next iPhone, it just lets you drag and drop, like, you could put a camera on the, like, I put it, like, off to the side, like, half off the camera. You could put an Android logo on it.

01:01:22

Like, This is this guy's good. What does this guy do for a living? Is he this is what he does? Or he's like I don't know.

01:01:28

Let's pull him. I'm pulling up his Twitter. His name is Neil Agarwal. Think So it says creative coder.

01:01:34

Yeah. This guy is cool.

01:01:36

Yeah, I like these personal portfolio. You had a pretty good portfolio website that you had built

01:01:40

do you like maintain it, or what what did you do with it? I haven't updated it in a while, but I will say

01:01:46

the page that gets the most traffic or or really gets the most people who contact me is my open page. So a lot of well, not a lot. Some startups have an open page,

01:01:56

that is We make this much revenue. We have this many page views, and normally they don't go much past that. I created an equivalent. I haven't updated it in a while, but it was based like, okay, this is how much I make from my personal projects, but it's also my goals. And it's like if my goal, for example, is I exercise fifty percent of the days in a year, I hooked it up to my spreadsheet and it publicly tracks it daily. So you can see exactly how much I'm doing or it shows what books I'm reading or I don't know lay things like that, but people seem to love that for some reason.

01:02:26

Yeah. Yeah. People do love that. They wish they were, like, as organized and on top and clear about their goals as you. That's why they love

01:02:32

But you you only put your side project revenue on here. Right?

01:02:36

Yeah. I've actually you know what? I have debated. I've been wanting to write an article which is about

01:02:42

my, like,

01:02:44

you could say monetary

01:02:46

ascent through life, as in

01:02:48

Wow. That's that's a new that's like post economic, my monetary understand. That's amazing.

01:02:54

I'll say so The reason it's an ascent is not because I make so much now, but I just made so little starting out. And so I've been wanting to write about that because kind of, you know, I feel like I've learned some things, but also I think it'd be interesting to actually publicly say, in this year, I made x. And and I've seen some celebrities do this, but, you know, twenty years later, they're like, look at my tax returns. Right. But I kinda wanna do it now and say, look,

01:03:16

five years ago, I was making x, and then I made x and and to really, like, publicly share how much I made, how,

01:03:22

like, what jobs they were, etcetera, and what I learned along the way. But I know I'm just gonna get trashed.

01:03:28

You know what I mean? Because because saying you make a bunch of money now

01:03:31

is not is not something people love. So

01:03:34

I've stayed away from it, but I kinda want to you anyway.

01:03:38

Yeah. Yeah. I've thought about those same things, and I'm just like, why do I wanna invite this in? I I don't need this. Once you make a bunch of money, you're like, I don't need to kind of hore myself out there for the, for the attention anymore. So there's out of this, like, this, like, counterproductive thing where it's like, well, the reason I would for me, I'm very, like, simple, which is like,

01:03:57

people when they do that stuff, they're like, I just wanna increase transparency in the world or, like, you know, I just want other people like me to know, you know, I think, you know, we should openly share. I think we should openly share strategies. I think we should openly share tactics.

01:04:09

I think you should privately, with a group of trusted people, share the your numbers itself,

01:04:14

but to publicly, for everybody, share how much you make, I think only is in is is in your interest when you're not making that much, but but it's growing, then once you're making a bunch, at that point, the kind of risk reward flips, I think, at least.

01:04:28

And so, you know, I'm I'm not that into that. But but the school I noticed there's no twenty twenty two goals. What happened? We're almost at the end of the post it too. I gotta post it, but I help we'll say I'm way behind on them. So maybe that's why they haven't seen it.

01:04:40

Are you are you like a goal hitter? Like, do you hit, like, most of these roles?

01:04:44

No. I mean, I'm one of those people who I hit some of them, but that's how I think it should be. Right? If you're hitting a hundred percent, you're not setting ambitious goals. If you're hitting nothing, then you're just lost in the world probably, but had maybe fifty percent every year. Yeah. I think at Amazon, they had said somebody had said, like, seventy five percent if you if you're hitting more than seventy five percent of your goals, like, you weren't sufficiently

01:05:04

ambitious if you're hitting less than seventy five percent of your goals,

01:05:08

or, like, maybe maybe it was a little bit less than that. I don't know. But it was, like, you're not executing well and I feel like you didn't you didn't do a good enough job.

01:05:15

Yep.

01:05:16

Okay. Alright. What else we got? You got a bunch of ideas on here. You wanna give us a list of some business ideas.

01:05:22

Some quick ones. Okay. So business ideas.

01:05:26

I don't know if there's one, like, a new business idea here, but I thought this was interesting. I'm calling it salty

01:05:31

bowls and smelly water. And so, basically, there's two examples of everyone wants to eat healthier.

01:05:37

That's, I think, a pretty universal human

01:05:41

want, at least. And two companies are doing something interesting here. So Curin, which is k I r I n, It's a company in Japan, and they partnered with a university, and they found a way to make to basically use a super weak electrical current.

01:05:56

Both in bowls and chopsticks so that when you're eating something about the ionization or the electric current makes something taste saltier. So you can imagine, like, when you actually eat something your,

01:06:07

case buds or

01:06:09

yeah. What there's some something happening chemically on your tongue, and they've basically found a way to somewhat reproduce

01:06:11

this.

01:06:15

So you can actually eat food every not everyone. A lot of people including myself love salty food, you're actually eating foods with less sodium, but they taste salty. And then I'm just gonna quickly tack on the other one, which is similar where it's I'm calling it Smelly Water because it's this company,

01:06:30

called AirUp.

01:06:32

Which basically

01:06:33

has found a way to create a scented ring around a bottle's lip. So similarly, they found a way to make something taste better In this case, they were sent instead of electrical current. And they, I think, raised sixty eight million dollars. And so I think it's just this, like, interesting phenomena of How do you make something when there's the train? How do you make something taste good without actually changing the caloric or the

01:06:57

the intake

01:06:58

of the food? Hang on. Your your note here says it's making a hundred million plus a year.

01:07:04

Put put be, as like an estimate according to glimpse. Airup is. This, like, flavored ring of the bottle. So you basically you bring a bottle up to your lips. The water itself is not flavored. The ring is scented or flavored in some way. That when you drink the water, you get that, you know, whatever hint of citrus or whatever you're looking for. Is that it?

01:07:22

Yes. And I put

01:07:24

according to glimpse because I wasn't able to reproduce or, like, find that number online. I don't know where they got it. They definitely raised a bunch of money. I just don't know if that revenue number is correct.

01:07:34

That is crazy. Wow.

01:07:37

Have you tried either of these?

01:07:39

No. I want to. I saw the chopstick bowl one very recently, so I kinda wanna order one. And then I haven't tried air up.

01:07:47

Wow.

01:07:48

These are this is fascinating. I had not,

01:07:51

I didn't know you had said the salty bowl smelly water thing. I didn't understand what it was until you said that. But that's crazy. I mean, the the sort of like salt taste without without extra salt, that's kind of I mean, that's that's kinda genius if you could do that. Alright. You wanna close things off? Yeah. We can wrap it up. Where where should people kinda find you, follow you, where do they get your next podcast that's coming out, tell the people what they want?

01:08:12

Yeah. So you can find me at step smith dot io or on Twitter, step smith io. And then, yeah, we're gonna be hopefully launching the podcast soon, the a sixteen z podcast. You can find it anywhere that you find your podcast. Do you have a name yet or or not yet? It's called the a sixteen c podcast. Oh, okay.

01:08:28

Yeah. Sorry. There should be easy to find. Yeah.

01:08:32

Alright. Alright. Thanks for coming on, Steph, and, best of luck with the pod.

00:00 01:08:54