Encarta | Billionaire Marc Lore on What He Would Build Today and Future of Ecommerce

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I wanna create a company and I wanna sell it for a hundred million plus to Walmart or Amazon in three years. What opportunities exist in the e com or in the

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commerce world that Amazon or Walmart would buy my company because they desperately need something that I'm selling or some type of solution that I've created.

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I think Would you like him to do anything else for you, Sam, the most specific question? Well, no. That that that's actually not that specific.

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I feel like I can root the world. I know I could be what I want to.

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I put my all in it like the days off on a road. Let's travel never looking Alright. Today, we have Mark Laurie on the podcast. This guy is an o g of e commerce. He sold diapers dot com to Amazon for, like, I don't know, six hundred million dollars. He created jet dot com and sold it to Walmart for three and a half billion dollars.

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Good guy. He came on and, me and Sam were pretty blown away. Like, we

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kind of little fanboys of his right now. So so we enjoyed the episode. He had a bunch of good ideas. He talked about how to go raise a bunch of money to go after a big vision. He had some ideas in health care. Sam asked him a great question. Like, if I wanted to start a company today, then it could sell for a hundred million dollars to Amazon or Walmart,

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What product would you recommend I start? And he had a fantastic answer. So he had ideas at the at the end. And at the beginning, he talked a little bit about his kind of approach to why he bought the Minnesota timberwolves and how he's gonna run the team, how he builds his team, how he hires people, stuff like that. So the beginning is more philosophy, the end is ideas. And he also had a great a great answer. I asked him, like, when you bought the the basketball team, you just, like, send a huge wire.

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Like, just hearing those details are really interesting. But we do a whole long

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debrief at the end of this episode, which You might even find more interesting the actual episode because it's always fun to like discuss.

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Like, I always find the recap to be one of the most exciting. So give it a listen. Yeah. But he was great. I think you're gonna love it. And liked him so much. We wanted him to come back on. One hour was not enough. And here's what we ask you to do.

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Listen to the episode. If you're liking it, He said he's big on LinkedIn. So go to his LinkedIn. His name is Mark Laurie, l last name is l o r e.

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And just go pop comment on one of his LinkedIn posts and just say, hey, if I like if you like the episode, just tell them love the episode.

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Come back on. And that I think if he gets enough messages, we will be able to bring him back on and go deeper on a bunch of ideas that we didn't get to do today.

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Alright. Here's the episode. Enjoy.

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Okay. Cool. So we have a guest here. Sam, do you wanna you wanna tee him up? Who who's who is on the line?

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Yes. So

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e commerce tycoon,

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successful billionaire, and as of two thousand seventeen,

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is exceptionally

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Jack and Ball. Mark, I have to ask you which of these is your favorite part of Jeff Bezos.

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Says been polishing that one up for the last hour event.

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No.

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Mark, Laurie, we have

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Mark, you've got a lot of stuff. You've started four different things, right? Four different startups that have, successfully exited. The most popular one is probably a few more that are in stealth

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that I'm really excited about. Maybe I can share a little bit about. But Yeah. We wanna we wanna learn all about it. But the biggest one was

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jet dot com. That's one probably everyone knows.

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Before that, you did diapers dot com, which you sold to Amazon for five hundred and fifty million bucks ish. That one might have been bigger because that was sold to Amazon very early, and Amazon appreciated a lot since then. So maybe that one I don't know. You tell us which one is which one ends up bigger? Is it the early the early one or Jet?

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I think no. Jet definitely. I mean, it's still hard. The stock doubled,

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over the last four and a half years. So that was that was a good one. I gotta thank you for that. When they bought you,

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I bought the stock because I was like, yeah, there's plenty of room to run here for Walmart e commerce. And, yeah, I feel like I was a part of the company. I won a little bit as well just off the news.

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And you, and then you also sold a company called The Pit.

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Which is called the top. So that was, like, her five point seven. Right? Back in the day. In the day. And, you prior to that, you were, you worked in banking. But then before that, you were a runner. So I was a runner. I ran the two hundred meter and four hundred meter. What was your, well, I ran,

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high twenty ones in the two hundred and

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forty eights for the four hundred. Well, same with me. Almost exactly the same. Yeah. High twenty ones, high forty eights. Exactly.

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Yeah. For the same. I I got slower as the distance went longer and and four hundred was was sort of long. I was better at sort of the sixty yard and and

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And hundred and two hundred. But yeah. What was her hundred meter PR?

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Ten seventy four. Wow. And was that FAP? Did they do? Seventy four. Yeah. Wow. Well, that's pretty. You're moving.

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So I didn't have the endurance to keep it up, you know, in the in the two and the four, but Yeah. So so you you've done a lot of stuff. You've done you've done a ton of recent you've done a ton of stuff in the past, but even the stuff you're doing now, it's also interesting. You just you guys made a bid for the Tipper Wolf. Right?

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Yeah. We actually it went through. So we signed the payment agreement. So, yeah, we're just going through the MBA approval process now and then hope to close, like, probably in, like, six weeks. And your part was that a, a dream. Like, you know, I've had this dream as a kid that, you know, own an NBA team. That's that's the point of doing business. You know, it's a really small kid. It was like, play professional sports. Of course. That's where you start. Every kid, you eventually realize, okay, it's not gonna be that sport. It's not gonna be that sport. It's not, you know, And then I was like, oh, maybe, you know,

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it would be, Decathlete,

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you know, and go to the Olympics. And then I was like, okay, that's not gonna happen. Like, alright. Forget it. You know what? I'm just gonna, like, one day own a team. That that's what I'll do. That's amazing. So that was the dream, you know, and I I was a huge sports fan growing up. Filed every sport, watched every game, you know, it was a huge Nick fan.

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And then, you know, I had two kids and, you know, life happens and you sort of get get a little bit detached from sports, but,

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I love it. I'm excited to, like, dive back in and have a reason to it seems like back in it seems like, I don't know, ten, fifteen years ago, the sports team thing was like, you've made it. This is your, it's like buying a car. Right? It's like I buy my toy. I always wanted this toy. This is kinda like lifelong dream, and I think it's obviously still, like, kind of a passion thing. But also the business merits of of buying a team as an investment has actually become a pretty big deal because these franchises have appreciated like crazy because there's only whatever. There's only thirty of them. And, there's more sort of more billionaires than there are teams.

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give me a pie chart. Is this What percentage of this was just, I just wanna have it. It's like art,

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versus this is actually a good business decision. How do you think about that? Yeah. It's probably eighty percent the former twenty percent good investment.

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Like, yeah, it's it's

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not so much about being a great investment. Just not gonna lose money. I'm gonna have a lot of fun any time you're gonna have a lot of fun and not lose money, like, I love going to the horse track. You have a lot of fun, but you also have a lot of money. I kinda like this. You know, where it's it's, have a lot of fun and and maybe make a little bit of money too. It's, like, perfect. But I I'm excited about

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you know, just innovating using. I think there's a lack of, like, real innovation in sports in general, like applying sort of a technology mindset, like, How do you bring augmented reality to the entertainment experience?

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How do you move to, like, dynamic announcing?

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So you can choose your announcer.

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Dynamic,

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real time ticketing. I want people to be able to move to any open seat in the stadium at any time. Like, I've got all these, like, tech ideas on how to Right. Augment the experience, and it's just fun to have a platform to be able to, you know, buy these things and try and and and even you know, what's the moneyball version of of in basketball too? You know, like as a mid market team,

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how do you win? What's the strategy thinking that through? How do you, apply the same techniques of vision capital people? Like, what's the what's the mission? What are the values? What do you stand for? How do you show up every day? How do you live those values? Like, treat it like a, like, a real startup. And and to date, you know, I've talked to a lot of people. It doesn't really seem like anybody's sort of

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gone gone down that path yet. And are you just gonna run this like a company? I mean, like, because you're incredibly successful at running companies, but you don't mean, you know a bit about sports I imagine, but, like, this is like a total this is totally outside of everything that you've done. You've done e commerce. I I I love the challenge because every business that I get into, I don't know anything about it when I start. I didn't know anything about retail when I did diapers dot com. You know, I I didn't know anything about

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But when I started that, I started a bunch of startups recently. I don't know anything about that. I'm starting and building the city. I'm doing a reality TV show. I'm doing these things. And, you know, it comes down to vision capital people.

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It's you have to have the vision and you just think about it share it with people, like, a piece of clay. You keep molding the vision molding. I'm like, wow, this is a big vision. Everyone agrees. This is freaking huge.

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Okay. Great. How are we gonna capitalize it? Great. That's what I do. Raise money. I have lots of connections with investors that raised over a billion dollars. So, like, okay, we're gonna capitalize it. And then the third part is the most important and the hardest to get right is people, the pea part. And it's finding a great CEO and a great executive leadership team, setting the values,

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setting the mission, the corporate culture,

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getting the org structure right, getting the right people in the right spots and creating a culture where you get the very best out of each person that you bring in, then you kinda just sit back, then you're there as a strategic advisor,

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I think if you try and just sit, you know, micromanaging to make decisions,

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when you don't have the experience, that's where you get in trouble. Know, so if I were to come into the team and say, you know, I think you should draft so and so. And, you know, why are we doing this? And we should be playing, you know, this. And that's not gonna work. I just don't I I think who is the very best,

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you know,

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person in the world

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to, you know, run this part of the business, to run that part of the business, to be the chief people officer to bring in the very best talent and create a great culture. We're the best people in the world. And get them in the right spots, in the right positions. If the vision is right, and everybody's clear,

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exactly where you're going, what what the the the North Store is,

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and you've got great people and they're happy and they're empowered,

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great things will happen. And that allows me to do multiple things at the same time now because

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you know, I'm not getting into the weeds of it. A lot of your companies,

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are how much do you guys raise at diapers dot com? Diapers were raised fifty five million.

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Okay. So that's a lot, but not close to I mean, Jet was what? Like a bill I mean, because it was Jetty raised us,

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you know, like, eight hundred million. So substantially larger. Although, though, both are quite large, even this idea of being able to hire the best in the world and being able to hide people hire people to do to to to do a lot of the work that they specialize in. Could you have done that if you were bootstrapping your companies? No.

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I mean, that that's why, you know, we started, Alex and I,

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errod just started,

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a venture fund called VCP, Vision Capital People, we believe that there's a a really big hole in the market for

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people with big visionary ideas

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to get a big infusion of capital early, like, when they have nothing so they can go out and hire the very best team in the world. I think a lot of startups little bit of chicken and egg. How do you get the capital unless you have the team? You can't hire the teams till you have the capital, but you don't get enough capital until you prove it. And so you get a million bucks, then you get five million bucks, and you get ten million bucks. And each step of the way, you're sort of on a tight wire type you know, you you you're basically, like, one little thing goes wrong, so many investors lose confidence where you under, overpromise and underdeliver

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lots of things could go wrong. We basically say no. Vision Capital people, you have a big vision. We know this could be a really big idea. We know somebody's gonna do this at the right time to do it. Let's not undercapitalize it. Here's ten million seed. Go out and hire the best team in the world. That puts you in a position to

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have the best shot of a really successful business. And if you got the best people, you got the capital, and you have the vision right, your player now. You're kind of, like, worst case, you're gonna exit this. Somebody's gonna pick it up because you've got great people and it's the right time and it's a big vision. So What do you what do you think when

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so there's there's the case where Jet where that clearly is what happened and it it worked. And then you see, like, Quibi or something like that, raised, you know, clearly successful people at the start, raised a bunch of money, raised a billion dollars or so, more than that, I think.

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Big vision. Hey, we're gonna, you know, rethink Netflix for mobile

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and didn't quite hit it, and they're burning a lot of money. So even though they raised a lot, they're burned left them with. I don't know how many months, you know, the same sort of time, you know, two years of runway or whatever it was that, like, a normal startup has. So how do you think about that? Do you think it's, hey, look, the numbers game. It doesn't always work out, or do you think there's something different in the strategy

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that maybe they could have done or you've done differently that'll that leads to better results?

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Yeah.

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I don't know that intimately. Do you know the story? And I do think that's probably

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more the exception in the role. I mean, I I think Wait. Listen. Stars don't all work. So some of them aren't work. Do I think it had a higher probability of working because it was a big vision. They had a lot of capital and great people. Yeah. I think it I think it does. Specifically why it didn't work. The only thing from the outside looking in was were the

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the most talented people in the organization

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fully committed and all in to it. That's the only that's the only thing I wonder. I don't know.

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Obviously, you had really talented people, but were they dedicating their their life to it. You need somebody in these businesses that's sort of like, I'm running this business and dedicating my life to it. It doesn't have to be no so the person that's doing the VCP at the top, but who is that person? And and and and, you know, do you have the the right team to I don't know the end for that. That's where I'd probably wonder. And so me and Sam talk about this a lot because,

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you know, we think about, alright, what's next for us? We got got some money in the bank. We got time. We got, you know, we got all these dreams about what we might wanna do. And one of the past is similar to you where

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You, as an entrepreneur, you sort of can see these opportunities and you could be the you can be the spark that helps start them, but you're not necessarily gonna be the day to day operator in the weeds. Maybe like you were with first startup. Right. And, and some people, like, you seem to be pretty successful with this model, and it seems like it's dependent on those three things you talked about, having the right vision shaping that first.

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Getting capital in and then recruiting the right people. On the people part,

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take us into a job interview with you. So,

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Obviously, there's the standard stuff, you know, you ask what they've what they've I've I've hired

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I've tried to calculate it, but over a thousand people Right. That personally, like, you know, interviewed in my career. And I've honed,

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over the years, and it's changed. My thinking has changed on hiring people

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resumes, and I've I've I've gone from, you know, early in my career when I first started, you know, I just wanna feel like I wanna have a be with this Right. I realize how wrong that is, and people make that mistake today. And at least to all kinds of unconscious bias and things like that, it's the worst possible thing to do.

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I spend an incredible amount of time upfront on resume read, which I never used to do before. It used to be like, hey, this person's great. Oh, they they were a CFO. I'm looking for a CFO. You say they're great. Come on in front of you though. I I don't listen to what people tell me necessarily about people because there's always somebody out there that'll say something good about everybody. And so I kinda just discount that for the most part. There might be a select couple people that I really trust that, like, you work with this person. Me their their top five percent. Okay. But that'll show on the resume. And so when I look at the resume,

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like, I'm looking for

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a demonstrable

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level of success in whatever they do. So I'm think I get into their mind. I start at the beginning when they graduate school, and it doesn't matter what school they go to, but but they graduate.

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They go into into a company.

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If if they're there for a few years, Did they get promoted?

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Like, what did the trajectory look like? And then the most important part, when they leave that company and go to a new company,

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is it something that a top five percent it would do. Top five percent is move in a certain way that you start to learn machine learning these these,

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you know, trends.

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Right.

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And top five percenters, top ten percentage of the elite people. When they move,

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they move in step fashion.

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It'll be a bigger title, much bigger role or a better company.

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And they'll get in that company, and they will be promoted multiple times. And then they'll leave, there'll be another step change. And so I'm looking for that, like,

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multi company

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movement within the company and big step changes. Any kind of any kind of deviation to that. I don't I just don't even want even an interview. So a lateral move out.

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You know, move from a a Google to kmart. Sorry, kmart, but out. Like, I just I any any little, like, tap that says,

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not top five percent. And somebody could say, hey, but that's not fair. Like, I'm actually good. Or this person's great. I'm like, you know what? I'm not gonna interview it because, you know what? There's a chance I get honey potted. Right. Honey potted.

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Everyone's everyone experienced this. You basically bring somebody in for an interview The resumes may be not ideal. They come in. You spend one hour with them, and you just really like them.

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And they throw some buzzwords around. They've got old experience. And you're like, hired.

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Think about that. I mean, you're committing to, like,

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hire somebody and keep them in your company, hopefully, for years, to be an important part of the company. And, like, you have an hour with them. Maybe you have multiple people spend an hour, but still a pretty small amount of time. And so I don't let myself get honey potted. I've been honey potted

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many times in the past, and I unless that resume screams Superstore, which, again, it's only five out of a hundred resumes. If you say top five percent or ten out of ten and one out of ten and be really, like, say, no, no, no, it's hard because you're tempted, like, oh, they have good experience, this person, whatever. No. So when I interview someone,

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I know that they're a superstar on the resume, and so I can focus primarily on core values

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and their

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spotock traits. So, spotock is an acronym I come up with for traits that look for in people I hire. Smart,

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passionate,

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optimistic, tenacious,

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adaptable,

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kind and empathetic.

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And the last two are really important, kind and kindness and empathy,

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I found over the years. And you can get somebody that's super tenacious,

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passion that run through a brick wall, but also run through people and over people, and they're not you find somebody that has the passion,

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they're optimistic and tenacious

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and adaptable because you need that in start up. But at the same time, they're very kind and empathetic. And you get that person that's able to balance that, that's magic.

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And so those are the things. And and the interview questions,

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have nothing to do. I won't ask one traditional interview question. They'll all be

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questions to open them up to to try to get at what makes them tick and do they exhibit these traits?

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And, you know, I I have this theory, like,

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I'm I've now if you work in tech, you meet so many smart people that smart becomes kind of like table stakes. Great. Yeah. Everybody's super intelligent. Well, now what? And And clearly, smart isn't just the only thing that that leads to success. You need a whole bunch of other things that you mentioned.

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And,

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I sort of found like

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What's in rare supply? So which of those traits is in most rare supply? I'll give you my kind of opinion, which is I found that two really simple ones tend to be to to me, the lowest in supply

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and, and have a pretty outsized impact in startups. And those two are,

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energy or like enthusiasm.

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I I think bringing energy to the table every day is quite contagious,

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and you need it at the beginning when you're starting something from scratch. And so it seems like one of these anyone can do it. Yeah. Anyone can do it, but most people don't. And the other one is courage.

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So,

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the courage to either build something new

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say say something that's on your mind, to, like, not let a, you know, something that's below our standards go.

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Courage, I feel is an an extremely short supply.

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You take risk too. Right. I call it boldness. We call it bold at our company.

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But yeah, Do you feel like when you meet people, is there something you're just like, oh, I wish more people had x? What is x for you that you feel like is in short supply? Know, I mean, what you said there, so when I say, you know, passionate in optimism,

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I think,

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optimism

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isn't, you know,

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the sort of the optimism that allows you to be bold and take risk, and it's that optimism that you believe

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not only great things can happen,

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but also believe that people are good. Like your starting place is that it's just an optimistic view of the world. I think that's really important and

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It allows you to trust, which is one of the core values

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and and and in in in all my companies. I think trust is really important. If you wanna create a culture where the company trusts the employees and the employees trust the company. That's really important to create an environment where people are happy and feel empowered

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and they feel a sense of ownership. Trust is. So I have this idea that, you know, a lot of people say, y'all trust, of course, trust but verify,

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and I don't believe in the but verify Right. I think you start out trusting people,

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and until

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they prove otherwise. And it's very

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risky because you can get burned but I've seen the power

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of the upside of trusting somebody

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before they've necessarily proven that they deserve it. It's incredibly

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powerful motivator.

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And I've seen it in my personal life. I've seen it in business.

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People wanna

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They wanna run through a wall for you when you, like, wait. You trust me, but you can I can burn you? I can, yeah, but I trust you. Are you gonna burn me? Of course not. You know, you're trusting me. I'm not gonna burn you. That

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is an incredible value that I've learned. It's it's it's trust

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transparency,

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being really open with your employees, not hiding, not secretive.

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Here's the cap table. Here's the rounds of financing.

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Here's the numbers, here's all the information you need. There's I'm an open book. What do you wanna know? Like, there's no secrets here. You Right. Working this company, you're an owner. You have stock options, trust transparency,

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The other one is fairness

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that it's really important that people feel in order to create an inclusive,

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diverse workforce

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have to create a safe work environment where people feel safe coming to work. They have to feel like it's fair. They there should never be this feeling of like, That's not fair. That's why I have a,

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open comp system where everybody

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knows what everybody else is making, and everybody at the same level makes the same amount of money. So women, minorities,

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everybody makes the same. There's no,

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like, this idea that maybe it's not fair. My colleague? Why is my colleague that I do the same job? Why are they making more money than me? That sort of thing, which is usually a big reason why people lose trust

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and they don't feel, like, giving you everything I've got. And so I kinda take that off the table. So those are the three primary values. So you have the values of the organization, how they live them, and then the traits that you look for and people you hire. I mean, you kinda get that right. I think it's it's

23:19

matchable thing. Where did this where did this confidence come from? Because, like, having the confidence to hire the top five percent is a pretty big deal. Is high school track day, Sam?

23:29

Place your confidence comes from. No. It's actually just it's actually just trial and error failing a lot early on. It it's it's, you know, you know, well, just somebody I wanna have a beer with. It's making those mistakes. It's getting honey potted. It's,

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you know, hiring a person and having go through the pain of having to let them go and replace them. Like, it's so many lessons. I I I make so many less mistakes now that I did early in my career because I,

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you know, I see everyone makes the same mistakes. It's that's why I like to talk about it because it's like, it is the same mistakes. And people say, yeah. You know, I guess you're right. Like, there was, you know, the resume kinda did, but I was kinda like, well, the person said they were good. I liked them, and so I hired them.

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You have to be really,

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you know, extremely focused and,

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selective in in that. The other thing, by the way, it does help with unconscious bias too if you're,

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you know,

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inclined,

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when the when, you know, you go through the resume and you bring them in, and it's not about whether I like the person, you know, you they've already, like, you know that they're they're rock solid and you really can focus on on Spotic and and sort of help there. So I I wanna I wanna ask you about I mean, I think we got we should ask you about ideas, but But before we get to that, I wanted to ask one quick question. So you left banking in ninety six. Right?

24:49

No. It was ninety nine.

24:51

Okay. What and

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then I'm looking at some information here on on your timeline. You started this thing called the pit. The pit was a

24:59

it was it was in the internet marketing and Yeah. It was basically a sports stock market. We used,

25:05

to avoid gambling. We, you know, we used baseball cards to proxy for the athlete, but it essentially it was meant to be a a sort of sports stock market where you buy and sell players like stock. And you sold that for, like, six million dollars? Yeah. That was right after the the whole Nasdaq crashed in two thousand. I don't know if you guys remember, like, went down, like, I don't know, eighty percent or something.

25:26

And,

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Yeah. There there was no way to raise any venture money, and we only started it maybe ten months earlier.

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And we're able

25:34

we raised five million and sold it for five point seven. And everybody's like, yeah, do it. This is a great exit.

25:39

And we're like, okay. Well, then we'll do it again. Let's that's great. We'll sell this. Get the next idea. That's what I was gonna ask you is how you could sell for six million bucks after such a short amount of time, but I guess the answer is, well, because you you you raised a fair bit at least for six million dollars. Yeah. It was just I think it was just, you know, the tops at the time was interested in in the people that we'd hired. We hired a great team. We had a we had a vision for what we wanted.

26:05

And

26:06

they were there to provide some capital.

26:09

So yeah. So so let's talk about some ideas that you would need optimism about now. Right? So, so I think we could talk about Jet, for example, like, take some courage and optimism to to go after that prize and basically compete with the the the the empire of Amazon.

26:24

So but we'll come back to that. I wanna start with Where do you need to be optimistic today? What are you optimistic about? What ideas are are I know you've talked about startup cities. I don't know if that's the one you wanna talk about or if you have some others. But let's shoot us some ideas of what you think is exciting that you're optimistic about that maybe the whole world isn't, you know, it's not not proven yet.

26:42

Mhmm. I mean, I I gravitate toward tend to gravitate more towards, b to c businesses, business to consumer. I just like consumer businesses, and I think it's easier to understand some of those businesses than than sort of more like, you know, if you were, like, a biomedical company or something like that's harder to wrap farms around. I think there's more So most of the ideas and things in thinking I do is is in the the B2C world across lots of different industries. I've made a number of investments

27:08

and I'm involved with a few companies that I'm really excited about.

27:12

One is Archer, which is the basically, they're like passenger drones.

27:17

So I think think it's, like, basically an autonomous,

27:20

electric helicopter,

27:22

that basically

27:23

flies passengers you know, around. It's it's safer than how Is this a stack that you did? Yeah. Yeah.

27:30

Gotcha. Did us back a couple months ago and

27:33

going through the SCC process now. That's crazy.

27:36

Super excited. That's a great

27:38

VCP.

27:40

So the the two founders you know, came over. Actually, I sit on the couch right here, and they said we got this vision for these flying cars, these these these these drones that carry passengers.

27:49

It's the right time. This is why it's the right time, Mark. This is how big the industry is gonna be. This is why it's gonna work. This is why the technology is right. And I was really taken by the vision. I thought they had it nailed.

27:59

And they said, hey, we need five million now. We're gonna hire the best engineers

28:03

in the world. We're gonna take them from the best companies. We're gonna go raise fifty million and build the state of the art, the latest and greatest of these of these aircraft.

28:13

And

28:14

I thought the two fairness were exceptional. So great start to the to the founding, to the p part of the VCP.

28:20

And I thought, okay. I'll give them the five million, and I'll help them, you know, hire this this team. And I'll help him raise the fifty. And then you're on your own. Right. And that's what we did. I put five in. We helped raise, you know, helped hire the the engineering talent.

28:34

Helped them raise fifty million,

28:36

and that was two years ago. And then they just raised a billion through this back. And so now it's a four billion three point seven billion market cap or something. And it was really an idea on this couch two years ago, but it shows you what I was saying before about rather than going through this process of, like,

28:52

seed can't hire the great team, the chicken and egg thing. It's like, here's five. And let let's get the team and and simultaneously go and raise fifty. So very short order. They had fifty five million dollars, and they had the best team. And I do think they've built the the very best aircraft in the industry right now and they're on their way. Like, it's a it's a massive TAM.

29:12

And so I'm looking at opportunities like that.

29:16

And I can tell you some other ones too. Yeah. Go. Yeah. Yeah. Well, another one that was in the news is is,

29:23

basically mobile kitchens.

29:25

So looking at the trends in food delivery and Millennials and gen z not wanting to cook and want food delivered and things,

29:32

know, I just saw that, you know, it sort of takes a long time to get it delivered,

29:36

inconsistent. The quality suffers in transit,

29:39

and, it's expensive. And I thought, oh, if you can solve those three things,

29:44

and how do you do it? Well, what if you cook in a mobile kitchen if the restaurant basically came to you and it cooked in your driveway.

29:50

Hot,

29:51

much faster because the the trucks already on the road, and so they're they're

29:55

likely just minutes away.

29:57

And,

29:58

and so I made a pretty big bet, on that company

30:02

and,

30:03

you know, still in stealth mode, but I'm really excited about it. I think there's a How how is that different than a food truck? So So it's a mobile kitchen, but it's for multiple types of food or or probably like Each mobile kitchen is a different restaurant, different cuisine. Okay.

30:17

And,

30:19

the idea is to is to get the best restaurant,

30:21

of that cuisine in the country instead of bringing it to a central central place. You know, it's it's high quality food that's piping hot that's, you know, delivered to your door

30:30

fast.

30:31

That that's an exciting, I think, a big tam, big market,

30:35

food. That's where the puck's going.

30:38

I think there's there's

30:40

lots thing lots happening now with laws changing in in sports gambling and things. I think there's really big opportunities there to maybe bring back some of what I did before.

30:50

What what was that? Exactly.

30:53

What? You said you're talking about the pick. Yeah. But you said bringing it back before. No. Just in in the new now with the gambling laws changing thing, are these an opportunity to create a true sports stock market and and do it right, like, where it really feels like you're buying and selling players like stock

31:09

by by leveraging some of the changes in in gambling laws. Have you seen, something I mean, Sean was really into this Big Cloud. Have you did you see that? No. I didn't. You don't know what Big Cloud is?

31:21

Oh my gosh.

31:23

Sean, you wanna explain. I mean, it's pretty much it's kind of what you're describing.

31:27

What they did was they basically took Twitter

31:30

and they turned it into,

31:32

a social network where you don't just follow the person, you can invest in them. So the the cool thing about this was what they did was let's say on Twitter, I have, like, I don't know, a hundred forty thousand followers.

31:41

So from day one, they what they did is they took the top ten thousand Twitter accounts,

31:46

and they had raised, I think, a hundred and fifty million dollars from VCs here in Silicon Valley. And they used it to to basically pre buy and invest in all those accounts. So on day one, when I walked in, they said, hey, if you sign up for Bitcoin, if you claim your account and verify it,

32:00

like, basically, meaning you tweet out that, hey, this is my Bitcoin.

32:03

I walked into, like, seventy five k,

32:06

worth of my own coin, right, worth of my own stock.

32:10

And others were already buying it because they were saying, hey, if Sean joins, we think that he might, you know, continue to to grow his following.

32:16

And so we wanna invest. So the idea being we've all had this experience where you discover a band early or an athlete early or a a content creator online, a blog And if you see them before they're huge, but you really like their stuff, you can buy their coin. It's like every single person gets their own little little little Bitcoin, basically.

32:35

And, and then as they get as more people buy it, yours appreciates. So as a curator, as a fan, you get to sort of go along for the ride along with the the star themselves. And where is the intrinsic value ultimately? Because I think that's the key. A lot of these things fall down in the end. So they don't have a ton of right intrinsic they don't have a ton of intrinsic value. The one thing that it does have is now as the creator. So I have all these shareholders, right, that own my coin. Some people own tens of thousands, some people own a thousand, some people own a hundred bucks of my coin. I can then basically reward my shareholders.

33:05

So in, you know, in the stock market, you give out a dividend or, you know, that you you can reward your shareholders. And this, I could do the same. So I could say I could do it literally a dividend. I could say, hey, for whatever I earn this month, my shareholders are gonna you know, get get their proportionate share. I could also say, hey, we're gonna do a version of this podcast,

33:24

that only my shareholders get to listen to. Right? Like a like an only fans or or these different products that they sort of say, if you if you're a subscriber of mine, then you get the content. So you can kinda payroll the content. It's a type of dynamic membership, almost like a membership that can I can come up with whatever the perks are for my members? And so then the creator's all jockey to offer better value to to their holders because their stock appreciates the more incentiv incentivized that they make it. Now this is a one and a hundred, honing a thousand idea, but I do think there's something I think there's something interesting. Yeah. It certainly sounds interesting. I I tend to shy away from things where I don't see, like, the the the twenty year, thirty year, like, the intrinsic value, like, how it ultimately this could be a great exit and yeah. Like, I I think with gambling,

34:09

laws changing, there's a way to give players intrinsic value. So you basically get basically say at the end of somebody's career,

34:17

I'm gonna pay you based on their career stats x, like and so you know this rookie comes up, you know, like, it has real value because the the exchange of stock market is giving it intrinsic value by giving you a predetermined amount of money based on certain stats over the career. Like, that kind of That's interesting. So so you could say,

34:37

So the house basically sets the line. Right? Let's say Zion comes into the league and we say, okay. The house believes that Zion, you know, the the the market the the line gets set, that Zion's gonna be buffane player, and maybe that means x, y, and z stats. This many MVPs, this many points, whatever it is. Do you think it's better than that? You buy. You you buy. If you think if you think that's not gonna happen, you don't buy, are you short? And basically, the careers, so so you get to predict the player's

35:03

journey And then the the better then it's like a super fan, basically. As the better they perform, you feel like you're being vindicated and you're actually gonna economically benefit from having identified

35:14

somebody who's gonna perform higher than what the market thinks. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. What,

35:19

I I think I read somewhere that you like to look at Google trends a lot. Like, your your and and because you're a serial entrepreneur, you invest in a lot of stuff. You're always looking for trends. You're always looking for what's popular. What I wanna know is

35:33

What what do you use? Like what signals do you look for to figure out where you're gonna go to? And also what signal told you that Jet was interesting

35:41

because

35:42

A lot of people probably said, don't even think about doing this like that you're, you know, you're I I imagine a lot of people are like Amazon or Walmart or someone already owns the space. What are you crazy? Is like an impossible feat.

35:54

Yeah. No. It's two two different things. I mean, I think with Jet, I had been intimately involved in retail, you know, with dot com and WAG and selling it to Amazon. I'm working inside Amazon. And I just felt like huge market,

36:05

huge tailwind. It's the e com is gonna continue to grow at double digit the next five, ten years.

36:11

And I just believe that there wasn't, you know, it wasn't a winner take all, that there was room for another player.

36:19

And I thought we can raise a significant amount of capital and hire a great team. So we had this really big vision

36:25

with this tailwind

36:27

raise a ton of capital and have a great team. I thought if you do those three things right, good things will happen. I don't know what's gonna happen. Either it works, your exit, strategic wants it. Like, if you're in the right market at the right time, you have a great team and you've invested the capital wisely,

36:42

you've got an asset that in worst cases can be worth more than the capital you raised. That's that's my mentality with these things,

36:50

in in anything you do. Right? It's like there's the worst place to be is sort of in that no man's land where, like, you you spent,

36:58

not a ton of money. You don't have the best people you spend enough money that is kind of expensive for somebody to buy as a strategic.

37:05

It's not really worth it. You know, people tend to buy it. It's the barbell strategy. They'll buy the aqua hire you raised a million bucks and you bootstrapped it and you have, like, three good people and somebody will say, like, oh, this is great. Like, here's ten million. And you're like, oh, that was, like, not a bad exit, made a little money. I'm gonna work for this company. There's that. And then there's, like, you can,

37:23

be big enough

37:24

to matter

37:25

to a really big company. That has the capital to to put down hundreds of millions or billions in an acquisition. There's a lot of people in the, like, the in the middle, and that's what VCP is. That's why it's like, no. Ten million, fifty million, let's hire the very best team. If it's the right market, there's gonna be a buyer for it. Right. And and that's kind of the strategy. What's interesting is so when I sold my company, we we never revealed the price, but let's just say that like hypothetically it was like thirty or forty million dollars.

37:52

I noticed that Exactly.

37:55

A a deal.

37:57

Just for a sake of argument, that a a deal in that size

38:01

it seemed like it was as hard of work as if I sold it for four hundred billion dollars. No. It's harder. That's what I think it's harder at. It was harder because I was doing a lot of the work. I actually didn't hire a banker. So I was doing most all the work, and it was

38:15

hell. But it's not just the work on your side. I think what he's pointing out is price tag is significant where the company can't just cut the check real quick, right, like you could with a a small aqua hire.

38:25

But you don't have enough of an asset.

38:27

That they can say this is a big strategic bet that they're making. You're in the middle, and I think that's, forget the entrepreneur side. It's always hard as an entrepreneur. That's a really tough place. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm saying that that's just one of the reasons why it was hard. It also It was hard. It was really hard. You must be a really good entrepreneur because it's really hard, I think, to exit

38:47

in that middle ground. Like, it's hard to exit. Most companies in that middle ground,

38:52

they don't exit successfully. You know, it's easy to do the aqua hire, and I think it's easy to do the big the big acquisition of a big company. It's tough. That's sort of like ten to a hundred million. And the entrepreneurs I know that have exited in that in that space there,

39:07

they're strong. They're, like,

39:10

really strong.

39:11

Well, so that's the kind of an interesting thing because I think that me, well, younger, like even just a few months younger, me, as well as most people would think that well, as far, like, if I could sell something for twenty to thirty, that's like bite size ish. That's like

39:26

you know, some company would buy us without having to get like board approval, like, oh, it'd be a no brainer for them to do it. And what you're kind of saying, and what I experienced a little bit is is actually probably easier to be a little bit more audacious

39:38

and raise money and go after it. Or I would actually say the other way around, it's easier to do that. Or in order if your if your goal is to build wealth and have a good life, it's probably best maybe not to raise any money, and never sell and just travel build the company over a long period of time. But,

39:55

let's say you were you,

39:57

but you don't have your brand name. Right? So let's let's bring you back. We give you youth, but we take away your reputation. Right? So we're gonna take you back. You're twenty one, but you don't have the reputation.

40:06

But you do have the same sort of mindset that you have today. You have the same knowledge, let's say.

40:10

What spaces would you be going into? And would you also be trying to do the same type of bet? Like, do you think you could raise a large amount of money just through charisma and hustle and and vision,

40:20

without having the reputation. So take us take us do it through a scenario. What do you think you would be interested in working on or building if you were twenty one again today without the reputation.

40:29

Yeah. No. That's a great point. And I think, you know, early on, and a lot of people, I think, share this you feel like it needs to be something like,

40:36

really original or something nobody's thinking about it. Nobody's doing or something niche or, like,

40:43

And

40:44

that's kinda what it is. It's niche, and the venture capitalists are like, it's not that interesting, you know.

40:50

And I've learned that it doesn't need to be

40:53

something, like, niche or super inventive. It could be just finding really big talent Like, just say something like, okay, health care. Okay? And what's a really big idea? Like, where's the puck going in health care? I would study where the venture capitalists are investing, what types of companies that do the research, like, where is the money going, follow kind of the money? Cause that'll kinda give you some idea of where where some of these trends are right now.

41:19

And, you know, with artificial intelligence and telehealth and things, there's like a lot of money pouring into that. So just I would look at the landscape. I'd study the different companies who's getting funded, who's doing well, and think about, is there another angle? Is there something

41:33

not like inventive

41:35

or super original, just like a just a little hook, of something different that's not being done,

41:42

and put together a big vision that requires ultimately hundreds of millions of capital

41:47

and work backwards from that and say, okay. That we think this is gonna be a multibillion dollar opportunity.

41:53

You know, we're gonna, you know, start with ten million. We're gonna hire this great team. Here's division. Here's how we're gonna get there. Work on that plan and that pitch deck, I'd spend

42:01

hundreds of hours on that deck and on the vision and mapping it out. And

42:07

somebody will bite because it's the right time, it's the right space.

42:11

You know, if you're really good and they they feel like you've got something, and you've got this big plan, and you know, there's a good chance you'll get that you'll get that

42:20

that ten million dollar a c check to go hire a great team. And you talked about you've talked about where's the puck going.

42:27

Give us more. What do you where what are some other so you talked about food delivery and you talked about how what the next evolution of that might be, the restaurants on wheels, that solves a bunch of problems. You talked about transportation, right, huge TAM, flying cars. That might be where the puck is going. We see that Google funded,

42:42

you know, Kitty Hawk. We and, you know, Uber was working on it. A bunch of people were working on this. Maybe there's something there.

42:48

I'll give you a couple more. Yeah. Give us more. So one, I think, conversational

42:52

commerce. So in retail, I think the next big step change is the idea that you would

42:58

use text and voice

43:00

to order anything you want in a very conversational way. So imagine you know, talking to the to someone that is as knowledgeable as the most knowledgeable person in that area on the showroom

43:12

of a specialty retailer. You wanna buy a TV? It's like you're there at Best Buy talking to the TV expert, you know, and you're just conversing. And somebody at the same time who knows you as well is your best friend.

43:24

So hyper personalized

43:26

this idea of getting a one best answer

43:29

The idea of, like, search engine twenty years from now is gonna be laughably like the cassette tape. It's like, wait. So dad, you used to, like, go. You wanted to buy a toast and you typed in toaster in this, like, search engine and you had ten thousand responses

43:41

and you had to, like, read reviews and look at all this and search and filter,

43:45

that's not the way it's gonna be done. You're basically just gonna say, hey, I need a I need a toaster.

43:50

How much? I don't know. What what's a good amount?

43:54

Two hundred bucks, you get a great toaster. Really good. Okay. Great. Wanna make a recommendation. Boom.

43:59

Buy it. And it just she ships it. Right? Like, it's gonna be very conversational.

44:04

And the the we talk a lot about personalization retail, but nobody's even close to doing it in a way that it it's gonna be done in the future. And I think voice

44:14

requires

44:15

one best answer. Otherwise, voice doesn't work. You can't give you a hundred things. It's voice. It's gotta be like, you know, if you were asking your your best friend, hey, like, know, I know you know toasters, like, what should I get, man? You know, like, that kind of thing. It should be

44:28

very,

44:29

on point. Who's doing this now? That's exciting. I like that a lot. What what companies are doing this now? I mean, there's a lot of companies that are, like, again, early stages of it and stuff, but there's nobody again that's if you said, like, who's got the world class team, who's raised, you know, significant capital,

44:47

you know, nothing But is there, is there a product I can go look at and be like, oh, I get it. I understand what he's getting at. Like, I understand why Mark is obsessed with this. Yeah. I mean, we had something called Jet Black when I was at Walmart, and we,

44:59

it was basically this for New York City,

45:03

primarily parents And

45:05

it was gangbusters. I mean, it was like, you know, people stopped using Amazon Prime. It was they just dropped it. It's like all the shopping, the entire the entire wallet chair.

45:14

Was was given to Jet Black, and it was multiples of what they were spending on Amazon. It was deep into the tail. It was everything.

45:21

People loved it. And it was a great test. It was very expensive because in order to get the commerce to see the conversations.

45:29

Sorry. You need to see a lot of conversations

45:31

to have it automated. So in the beginning, you have humans in the loop to sort of bridge between the time that, you know Right. There's the AI learn. Past tense. Did it go away or that still exists?

45:42

No. It it went away. But Gotcha. It was expensive. Yeah. It was expensive, and there just wasn't the right time for Walmart. Right. But I think if for in the startup world. Yeah. I think I think it's totally different because

45:55

Walmart maybe doesn't wanna, you know, invest hundreds of millions or billions But a startup, totally different. It doesn't hit your income statement.

46:02

Everyone gets the gate, knows it, you put capital to work, and you build something great. So there's that. I think in health care too, I think, like, things I was talking about with telehealth and all the stuff's coming together. I think the idea of, like,

46:15

people taking control

46:17

of their health,

46:18

with home diagnostics and things. Yep. Like, there's should be a dashboard that exists. You can look up. I put in my name. Okay. Mark Laurie, here's my dashboard.

46:28

I've got a number of gadgets in the home that I do on a weekly, a monthly basis. Like, you brush your teeth twice a day to take care of your teeth. What are you doing every day to take care of the rest of your health? Like, you don't do anything. Yeah. There's all kinds of devices and things you know, monitor,

46:42

you know, a little prick of blood and then monitor blood sugar.

46:46

You know, do the blood test once a month. Get all your things in there. Look at the trends of what's happening with your PSA. Do you have this issue? And then it basically the machine learning and through all the data, to be able to see, like, okay. You should see a doctor here. You should do this then. You should do this. So here's the probability of dying at this age. Here's the, you know, here's the the the heart attack risk that you're running. Your cholesterol's too high. If you get it down, here's your probability of heart attack comes down. Like, sort of make it more transparent. Right now, it's like this black box. You go to the doctor once a year, do some tests

47:18

and whatever. Like, it's just kind of like a black box. Like, oh, you know, here's some medicine for your cholesterol. You don't know what's wide or why or how it impacts your odds and, like, whether you should be really worried, a little worried, No doctor will ever give you probabilities about anything.

47:32

There's no diagnostics. It's like you have to go to the professional.

47:36

There's no home stuff.

47:38

I think all that's gonna change in the future. I do think people gonna, like, really take control of their their health in a completely different way. And gonna be doing things other than brushing their teeth to take care of themselves on a daily basis.

47:49

That's who do you I just had a daughter and I feel like when she's my age, she's gonna be like, dad, how are you even alive back then? You guys had you didn't know what the hell was going on inside your body. Now we have this thing that we wear that tells me everything that I need to know. I know when I take a bite of this, my blood sugar goes up or down, and I know, like, how stressed I am. I know, you know, I think it's gonna seem like cavemen how we we actually get today. I agree. There's gotta be certain things you get tested at certain times. You know, my daughter had celiac disease. We didn't figure it out until she was nine years old. I think that's I mean, it's not that rare of a disease. Like, some doctors should have been like, hey,

48:25

Here are the here are the things you do. Here are the probabilities

48:27

of what's what, and, you know, these are the tests you need. I was asking my mom. My mom has celiacs as well, and she found out when she was fifty.

48:35

And,

48:35

and she was like, yeah. As a kid, everyone was like, oh, I don't know. You're you just have an upset stomach all the time. She's like, you know, I'm a kid in India I'm sure I had this my whole life. It's just like, don't be ever new. And I was like super I never gained any weight because I couldn't, like, process any of the food I was eating. It took till I was fifty when I found out. Exactly. Everyone should have genetic profile. You know, that gives changes to probabilities based on genetics. Everyone should have that. It should be, you know, test certain times that influence your odds and probabilities and certain ways to, you know, structure everything that's just it's more organized. Like, right now, it's not organized. I don't know if you guys feel that. I I feel like it's not organized at all. Yeah. Well, you got like,

49:12

like a wolf and then an aura ring. And I have a smart scale. I've got, like a glucose blood, a continuing glue glucose blood monitoring. I've got a smart bed.

49:21

Like, I've got, like,

49:22

eighteen different smart things, but they are quite siloed. You know, but they don't actually tell me the answer. They just you know, like, they don't actually say like,

49:33

this is what this all means.

49:35

Yeah. You know, maybe they'll say like, your extra stress this morning sleep more and or don't work out as hard or your body fat is too high but,

49:44

it's kind of limited to like pretty high level stuff. Yeah. It should it should be way more structured. You should have

49:50

be much more in touch with it. Like sleep apnea is another thing. I don't know. So many people struggle with this. They're like, all these things, and

49:59

the doctor doesn't just say, like, you know,

50:02

it takes a long time before the doctor's like, you should do a sleep Aetna study or something like Totally. That there there's things that you could have devices that are listening near your bed that can know. It sounds that sounds like Well, I always thought it was weird. Like, do this. A lot of cancers you can are cure or are are okay like if you can get a certain type of cancer and be perfectly fine so long as you catch it early enough and it's kind of outlandish an archaic that, like, you can have a a cancer and not know for, you know, many months or a year. It's like, what the fuck? A year. Yeah. You

50:31

could have known this, like,

50:33

instantly,

50:34

you know, and that's kind of like crazy to me. Well, MRI, by the way, there's MRI scans that you do a whole body scan and they detailed

50:40

look at, you know, anything cancerous. And then stitch it together every year you do it and you can see micro changes and things. That exists now. It's just not made available

50:49

to, you know, the the people because of the the cost of it. But nobody even has the option of even knowing that that's available that I should do that. You could imagine, like, a system that basically says, hey, Here's the probability of cancer. You can take this test. It's a couple grand. It's up to you, but at least you know, okay, wait. Maybe I should just spend the two grand because it'll increase the probability of catching it x number years in advance and I know, okay, it's healthier. No. We just wait until we're sick. Like you said, with cancer, it's like, alright. Now it's Now it's, you know,

51:21

definitely won't I like asking these questions because I like knowing, like, what meets your standards, but basically, who in this space are you looking at you're saying that's kinda promising. Is there any, like, one or two companies?

51:32

Yeah. I I don't

51:34

I I kinda

51:35

maybe I should more, but I I really spend

51:38

a lot of time just thinking about, like,

51:43

a complete

51:44

sometimes

51:45

sometimes I

51:47

if you know too much about a space, it's hard to clean slate and invent

51:51

because you kind of, like, get tied too closely into what what people are doing. So I like the idea of just thinking about it through the lens of a of a consumer

52:00

on what

52:01

is you know, this trends are happening in telehealth.

52:04

AI, you know these trends are happening, and then how do you stitch it all together? That's just thinking, sitting and thinking every day. Like, what's the big idea

52:12

And when it's really big, you do know nobody's doing it. And then you can reverse engineering, go back and say there are any people that are working on certain things that could be helpful to it. But you gotta go so big that you know that nobody's playing there. And that's where I think the opportunity lies. It's like, yeah, it's gonna need billions of dollars to pull it off. You're gonna have to prove it in a in a in a in a small area.

52:35

It's gonna be very expensive, but then when you prove it, it extrapolates out to a trillion dollar business. Like market cap opportunity.

52:42

Let's say.

52:44

Yeah. You guys. Yes. I I don't I don't I couldn't tell you, like, I'm not, like,

52:50

tell you all the different little components that exist right now.

52:53

Something that you said earlier was basically you kinda, like, we're we're reverse engineer a little bit from, like, you'd be like, I'm gonna where the money's going, then I'm gonna build this deck and I'm gonna,

53:03

raise money and then go build the thing.

53:06

What's something that let's say that I said, Mark, I wanna create company and I wanna sell it for a hundred million plus to Walmart or Amazon in three years.

53:15

What opportunities exist in the e com or in the commerce world that Amazon or Walmart would buy my company because they desperately need something that I'm selling or some type of solution that I've created.

53:26

Would you like him to do anything else for you, Sam? Most specific

53:30

question. Well, no. That that that's actually not that specific. A lot. I mean, a lot. I'm not I don't work at Amazon. I don't work. Give it to you. You're a hundred million three years. Yeah. No. Well, you said one personalized shopping

53:40

conversational.

53:41

That's that's not Sorry.

53:42

I think that's that's not likely a hundred million. That is

53:46

like, way bigger or it's or it's not exist. Like, that's a little bit more binary. Right. I don't think a hundred million. That's very impossible. Sorry. I hundred million with just some rent No.

53:57

Good. It's good. Have a goal. Much wanna answer. Three years, I think it needs to be

54:03

a sort of a niche technology that could that's where the puck's going, that's gonna be helpful to differentiate. It's gonna be something

54:11

three years is fast. So it's gonna have to be tech more than having shown real market traction. But it's gonna have to be a technology that's probably hard to build that involves

54:20

you know, AI, the thing that comes to mind would be, like, fit

54:25

analytics.

54:25

This idea that you're going online and you're buying

54:29

you know, address

54:31

and being able to see it fit on you without having to get it delivered to your home, you know, return rates on apparel are forty percent. It's very expensive for retailers,

54:41

and it's a pain in the, you know, for people to buy stuff, bring it try on it to send it back and things. So the idea that you know my body dimensions and use artificial intelligence

54:50

to know the inside dimensions of the garment to see exactly

54:53

how it's going to lay in my body without having to try it on, to cut down return rates, dramatically,

55:00

there's billions of dollars that you can save retailers there.

55:03

And apparel is definitely,

55:06

an area where where there's a lot of focus and

55:09

like, that's just one example off the top of my head. I love that. That's a great answer. That's a great answer. There there's I I saw this guy in Japan.

55:17

He's a billionaire

55:18

entrepreneur and like this is like his third or fourth swing, but he created a suit that had these ball like these dots on this black suit and he would send you this bodysuit for twenty dollars. And these and these white dots on this black bodysuit would, you know, like in a video game where that motion capture you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what it was. And it would the camera was able to tell,

55:40

differently than if it was you weren't wearing this suit, and he would use that to try to upsell you on proper fitting clothing. I saw that it never went anywhere when I was like, oh, that's kind of an interesting thing. I mean, listen. For every idea out there, there's

55:53

hundreds of people trying. That's why it's never really about the idea. It's about execution. It's about VCP.

55:58

So where they're undercapitalized,

56:00

did they have the best team in the world?

56:02

Like, In Quipi, I know you said that in the beginning, but are there examples of, you know, big vision,

56:09

right time,

56:10

massive TAM. Like,

56:13

raise it a lot of capital and have the world class team that's, like, all in. Are there there's not too many examples I could think of where fact, when I think of those examples, they usually have examples of things that have worked that worked. Yeah. I've experienced that many times where you have a world class team

56:29

ton of capital

56:30

and a big vision at the right time. Those companies get acquired because Like deep mind was a good example of this. Deep mind got deep mind. It was a AI company. Got acquired by Google for five hundred million. When, you know, no usage yet. It was just vision

56:43

and team. And then I think deep mind, they said, that once they've plugged it into, they do the fun stuff. Like, they'll go beat the best go players in the world or the best chess players in the world. So they show kind of its power. It goes flexes from time to time, but they also apply it to the Google,

56:58

AdWords,

56:59

machine learning. And I think it's generated, like, incremental multiple billions of dollars already for Google just on a slight optimization of AdWords. And,

57:07

and then on the other side, you have magic leap, where magic leap would probably be the current example of raised like a billion bucks. Huge idea

57:15

looks awesome in the demo, but they haven't executed it well enough where it actually works.

57:20

Yeah. Or you could argue also a little little bit early. Yeah.

57:24

That same exact company, like today going forward. Right.

57:28

Could be totally different game. So it is kinda interesting. It'll be great to to map out VCP against companies that have worked and didn't work and see what the hit rate is. Sorry, guys. I'm realizing I have a four o'clock. You gotta run.

57:40

Okay. No. Where where should people find you if they want more if they want more plug? How few people can follow you, find you, contact you, whatever you want. I mean, LinkedIn is is my primary where I'm putting out a lot of business advice and things like that. So I do LinkedIn. I just recently

57:55

finally just launched Instagram and and start becoming more active there. But, LinkedIn is probably the best place right now. Yeah. Alright, Mark. This was great. Thank you for coming on. Alright. Thanks guys. Thank you. It it went way too fast.

58:08

Yeah. It was good, but,

58:10

it ended quickly. I wanted I had so much more we could have talked to. I had much for it. I think we should actually hit him up and be like, dude, after after this episode goes out, he gets some love.

58:21

We should

58:22

ask him to come back because I need a part two. I had, like, five other things. I had so many. I had so many questions. He would it it seems like a he seems like a great guy. He his, he man, he's he's really charismatic. I I get, like,

58:35

why I I understand why he's successful. He would be dry he would be describing an idea off the cuff.

58:41

And I'd be like, you know what, this makes so much sense. I would, like, I would back you to the hills. Yes. This makes sense. I could see why he's been able to raise so much money. Yeah. He I asked that confidence question because he just oozes with that with charisma and confidence.

58:56

So let's talk about okay. So first,

58:58

I really love that coverage. I thought that was great. I thought he was Yeah. I agree. I thought he was great and I thought he made for a great guest,

59:05

especially the second half. His setup was bad. I cannot stand with people's I think he was talking to assist on a phone or a laptop.

59:12

With someone who's so successful like he is, Why do they not have awesome Zoom setups? Yeah. It's crazy to me. But I think they're just, like, on the go all the time. So they're like, I don't even have, like, I don't even hold my phone. This woman holds my phone for me. And, you know, I I just sort of speak out loud. I don't even type anymore. That's my That's my Wait. Abray, you just said he doesn't own a computer. Was he I think he was honest. True, Abray or you just bullshitting in the chat? That's what that's what I was told. He doesn't own a computer. See, that's what I was saying. Dude, I knew it. I knew he's in that ultra rich. Wait. So there's the mega rich. So all the the most rich is don't own a computer nor do they even touch a computer, their emails get printed out for them, and they either handwrite or just say things out loud and people go relay the messages. I think he's one notch below that where he doesn't own a computer. He just does shut off his phone. That's weird to me. I mean, not weird because, I mean, if you're a baller, go ahead.

01:00:03

Baller ball out. But, like, what if you just want a tight, long essay or if you wanna, or if you wanna just, like clubs like us can't understand the the a feeling where you don't need to type nothing ever. Or or you just wanna, like, search the web and, like, go on Reddit. Like, it just seems like easy to have. If you take my computer away, forget the work. I would be so bored. I, like, need to, like, you know, browse the internet.

01:00:26

Yeah. That's crazy. So he doesn't own a computer. That's pretty cool.

01:00:30

Yeah, the guy's awesome. He's had a he had a few really good ideas. I I wanted to ask him so he sent us these notes ahead of time and he said this thing about million. The the difference between a million and a billion. And I was like, oh, come on. I'm dying. We gotta save it. Yeah. I wanted to know what he what what he was gonna say. I think we slow plated a little too much at the beginning and just as my fault, I should have gone into one of these. But, okay, so a couple of things. So here's my takeaways. Here's my, like,

01:00:55

I don't usually do takeaways because I don't think it like, I don't know. I just don't bother. Usually, it's usually it's not like I really learned so much that I really wanna do takeaways. Just kind of entertained. But in this, I actually did have a few takeaways.

01:01:08

I thought I'm just gonna rattle them off. Insight number one.

01:01:11

The barbell of selling your company. It's very easy to sell at the small end, and even at the high end, the hardest path is actually that middle ground where both of us actually sold our companies.

01:01:21

I think that that's true. It feels very true from my experiences, and I've never heard anybody, like, kinda say it out loud.

01:01:27

So I thought that was that was a good insight.

01:01:29

I liked. And basically what it what what he I I don't think you summarized it or I don't think you said everything. Basically, he said it's easier

01:01:36

to sell a company for like he actually said ten million or under or like hundreds of millions. Right. Exactly.

01:01:44

And the reason why is, you know, the small ones, you can kinda cut the check just on talent.

01:01:49

The big one, you're buying, like, kind of a more fleshed out asset of technology or traction or or unique

01:01:55

talent.

01:01:56

And in the middle, he's like, you've usually raised enough money

01:02:00

where, like, your price you're asking prices too high for them to just just do it without blinking.

01:02:05

But you don't have enough proof

01:02:07

and enough of an asset that they can, like, justify a, you know, a big strategic purchase. And so that's actually the hardest one. I think he he was hinting at something that I think is true, which is that entrepreneur who's done that is the most dangerous entrepreneur because they have enough money or the next thing they chase, they're gonna go bigger.

01:02:24

But they didn't get enough where they're just satisfied and gonna go chill on the couch or on an island somewhere.

01:02:29

And, they've been through it, but they're not they're not done. And I think that that's what he was kinda saying, which is, like, those entrepreneurs are the ones you wanna bet on. I also, when I invest, that's, like, a great signal to me is when somebody's had a small win under their belt,

01:02:43

or a medium size win, I should say. Yeah. I had, of,

01:02:46

Andrew Chen, very successful, a six, and recent partners said some of the most He just said the most dangerous

01:02:52

entrepreneur is someone who's

01:02:54

somewhat wealthy enough that they, that they're set but they have a huge chip on their shoulder. Exactly. Anyways, those are For example,

01:03:02

Travis before he started Uber.

01:03:04

You know, he had red swoosh, which was like a kind of tens of millions win.

01:03:08

Ev Williams before Twitter, you know, he he had blogger and, you know, that was a good win, but you don't went for more. And there's there's a bunch of examples. Mark, you've been did the same thing. Right.

01:03:17

Okay. Some other things I thought he was interesting. So his model I didn't realize this beforehand, but his model is basically

01:03:24

it's kinda like moonshots.

01:03:26

It's basically

01:03:27

he's anti the the traditional playbook of Silicon Valley, which is raise in small steps. So raise a little bit of money, make a little bit of progress. Raise a little more money, make a little more progress, raise more money, make more progress. He's sort of like,

01:03:41

find the biggest market you can go after.

01:03:43

Raise a bunch of money and go make the boldest bet in that market. For example, what he did with Jet, he's like e commerce,

01:03:49

huge market, and growing double digits,

01:03:53

I thought it was interesting. He was saying, like, you, you know, you don't need this, like, brand new novel invention. It's like, the bet is gonna be on execution.

01:04:01

And you do wanna have, like, a new hook or, like, kind of, like, the ten to twenty percent that's that's innovative, but, like, eighty percent is the same as other players in the market. And so he was saying,

01:04:12

do that, basically, go raise a big chunk of money, recruit the best people, the best people make great product, and then go raise a huge amount of money to go for, you know, go for the the home run shot. And, I thought that was interesting. Most people don't use that playbook or don't talk about it, and that's like his specific Lane that he did as an entrepreneur, and he's doing as an investor. I thought that was cool. He also I asked him a question that you laughed at a little bit I thought it was a great question. And he had a great answer. The reason I left, it was a great question, and he actually gave a great answer, but you asked, like, what's the company I start. And in three years, so for a hundred million dollars to Amazon Walmart, it was, like, so specific that I was, like, it's almost like,

01:04:50

hey, Mark, like, I don't wanna think. Just tell me what to do, and I'll go do it. Like, it was such a such a solve my problem for me. I just laughed. Well, I went it was, what was the word that you said the other day? Or,

01:05:02

orthogonal.

01:05:03

Orthogonal.

01:05:04

It was my orthogonal way of asking,

01:05:07

of asking,

01:05:08

what is a problem

01:05:10

that big e com

01:05:12

businesses have? Yeah. That they that they that that that what are problems that need to be solved? A painter. That that was my way of asking that. He gave a great answer. He gave a great answer. The answer, he actually gave a a previous answer where he said something like conversational,

01:05:26

commerce, which is a really cool thing he'll explain. But the answer that he gave for that was,

01:05:32

Oh, fitting at virtual fitting. Yeah. Virtual fitting. So he gave a ton of really cool answers. And and the guy, this guy,

01:05:39

Mark Laurie, who was the He started jet dot com, which he sold for three and a half billion where and then he was the CEO or, president of Walmart

01:05:48

e com, and then He, before that, he had sold the company for six hundred million dollars to Amazon.

01:05:54

So, like, his his his

01:05:56

his perspective is like about almost as great as it can be. Yes. Exactly.

01:06:01

So I thought that was really strong,

01:06:03

and I liked,

01:06:04

I liked some of his stuff on the interviews, kind of like job interview side. I think don't know how much people will love that content because it's not as fun and it's not as junk foodie as ideas.

01:06:14

Right. But as somebody who ever if you ever actually have to do that, I thought there was some good good insights in there. And even though it was a little bit,

01:06:22

like, safe, like, nobody can disagree. The things he was saying were good.

01:06:27

I didn't feel like it was just cookie cutter. Like, I think that I think he genuinely believes it, and that's genuinely his approach.

01:06:34

And, it matters a lot to him. And I think that came through during that part, which is cool because you always wonder, like, this guy's doing this and this and this. How's he doing it? Well, it's like, it's always

01:06:44

got great people underneath him doing all those individual projects on a day to day basis. Alright. Well, then, how do you find those great people to actually make the difference between failure and success of the same idea is having, you know, that great operator underneath. So I thought that was pretty good. What'd you think of that part? Yeah. I wanted to ask him more about it, but we didn't have time. But basically, it sounds like he's not totally in the weeds of his businesses, which is the way to go.

01:07:08

You know, like, if you can if he can go out and I don't wanna be in the weeds of anything. I don't wanna be in the weeds of my marriage. I don't wanna be in the weeds of parenting

01:07:15

The weeds are the weeds, bro. I don't I don't wanna be in the weeds. I only wanna be in the weeds of the things that I wanna be in.

01:07:22

And when you start a company, there's so much stuff that you think you have to do and it's cool. I wanted to hear his perspective of him. He's like, look, I have the vision. I hired the initial people and I raise a ton of money and I just deploy that money and make everyone else,

01:07:37

specialize in what there's what they specialize in. But

01:07:41

we didn't get to ask him about it. Well, one thing he did show was sort of like when we were you were like, how do you?

01:07:47

How do you figure out what that vision should be? And he talked about a couple of things. He's like,

01:07:52

I look at where the trends are. Where's the going. Right? He's like one way I do that is I see where investors are pouring in money. Okay. That tells me that these spaces are probably big or these technologies or breakthrough technologies

01:08:03

And so it's either like a technology, like AI machine learning. Okay. Cool. I can apply that in another industry. Or

01:08:10

everything's, you know, a bunch of people pouring money into e commerce. Ecommerce probably really big or education, health care is really big. Alright. That's a big space. Now how do I go create the most bold vision that has, like, you know, an a slightly novel hook?

01:08:22

And I thought it was cool that he was basically like, I don't get bogged down in the in kind of the details of, like, what what is this player doing versus this player versus this player? He's just sort of like, how should it be? Right? When he was talking about health care, he's like, I should just wake up. I have a dashboard that says, here's what's going on in your body, and it recommends.

01:08:39

That, hey, you should get this checked with a doctor or you should improve this. And,

01:08:43

and I thought the, kinda, like, just from a mind of a customer instead of, like, industry research, I thought was better. That's a big Amazonian thing to do is is that, which is, like, you just start with the customer and you say, Here's how their life should be that would make them really happy. Alright. Now I have a pleased customer. Now I'll go figure out how to make that happen instead of the other way around, which is What can I do? And then,

01:09:06

does that partially satisfy customer? Okay. That's good enough. And I wanted to ask him about air, about Amazon. And working with Bezos and things like that. I I wonder what his opinion will be. Or buying the Timber wolves. I feel like there's more we could do there because he bought a sports team. You know, one thing, it is a crazy story that I'll just share here. I didn't get to up with him. But but, Ben found this when he was doing some research for this, was

01:09:27

he he goes,

01:09:29

with when Jet was when Jet was growing or early on with Jet, they had a contest. I don't know if you've seen this this article, but they had a contest. It was awesome. About,

01:09:39

who can acquire the most customers for Jet. You become a marketer. You you go spread the word. Whoever, whoever does whoever gets the most customers gets a hundred thousand shares of Jet.

01:09:49

And some guy went and did it.

01:09:51

And he he basically just did, like, kinda, like, paid marketing in a in a unique way. He spent eight the guy invested eighteen thousand dollars into the paid marketing, won the contest, and his hundred thousand shares became worth twenty million when it sold. And so this guy turned eighteen grand into twenty million as a fan of the company outside the company. Probably made more than anyone else in the company besides Mark.

01:10:11

Which is amazing to me. I remember that story, and I was one of those people trying to, this was like You participated in this? Oh, definitely. You didn't you didn't participate. Like, if you just it was basically so Robin Hood did a good job of this. I believe it was Robin Hood.

01:10:27

Clubhouse has done a pretty good job, but like basically Robin Hood's campaign right before they launch was you're on the waiting list, refer five people to move up a spot.

01:10:35

This was Jette's version of that, although Jet was first, I believe,

01:10:40

then Robin before Robinhood.

01:10:42

And it went incredibly viral. If I remember correctly, I think they had billboards

01:10:47

promoting this The contest. I yeah. Do you remember that? When you would I think We should have asked him about this. Alright. We'll save this one for next time, but I thought this is a story. Yeah. I could spend about two more hours with him easily. So I hope he comes back. Let us know in the reviews what you think. Oh, and quick update.

01:11:03

We're going to Miami. I think in

01:11:06

eight days or something. June

01:11:09

fourth,

01:11:10

we sold three hundred tickets.

01:11:12

That's great. I think we have we have a few left. We're releasing maybe what? Eighty more hundred more something like that? Yeah. We moved it to four hundred. It was three hundred. We moved it to four hundred.

01:11:21

We'll see what happens. Alright. If you wanna come see us, if you want us to to autograph your dollar bills, bring them to Miami,

01:11:28

June fourth,

01:11:29

I don't know how they should find the event bright. Just go to, MFM pod or my first million pods. So m f m pod dot com.

01:11:38

And put in your email email you the details. Right? Yep. And there'll be a link on there. If you go to m f m pod dot com, also if you just follow one of us on Twitter, you could definitely see the links we're we're we're promoting it. And do us a favor. If you liked this episode with Mark,

01:11:53

when we post it,

01:11:54

we're gonna post it, I don't know, or, I guess, go on LinkedIn.

01:11:58

And we I wanna shower him with love of people being like, dude, this great come back on, and then he'll come back on. So, we'll we'll we need to game LinkedIn a little bit. I might have to dust off the old LinkedIn password

01:12:09

to go and,

01:12:11

And because that's the thing. When guests come on, they I I've consistently heard this from the very beginning of this podcast, which is, dude, I get way more messages about this podcast than any other podcast I've ever been on. I don't know why that is. I don't think our audience is bigger, but something that works and when they get that that magic moment that of of people emailing them being like It works. That was amazing. It worked. They're they're down to do whatever.

01:12:33

And come back on or do whatever else. And you only need about ten, twenty, thirty. Like, you don't need a significant amount. Right. Twenty emails in one day being like, I love the I love you.

01:12:43

Is a lot of emails for for most people. It feels like it feels like a million. So Mark's name is m a r c space l o r e. Look him up on LinkedIn and just whatever his recent thread is, just click like comment and be like, just saw you on the podcast. So good. Yeah. Saw you on my first Amazing. Yeah. Go go go hammer his LinkedIn,

01:13:03

comments, or something like that.

01:13:10

I feel like I could root a word or know I could be what I want to.

01:13:15

I put my all in it like a day's all fun to roll. Let's travel never him back.