Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en [Music] so there’s this book that i’ve been meaning to read it’s on my uh uh to read list and it’s called [ ] jobs and so it’s this premise that like i i think was a professor some guy from school of economics of london or something like that and his whole like i i again just remember i didn’t research this much uh his whole idea here is that most jobs out there in the world like at least in white color world like it’s it’s just kind of unnecessary like and and to summarize it it’s like take a company like hubspot amazon twitter like what would happen if you like laid off two-thirds of the people like would it would anything do we do we think anything would change other than the company would just make more profit and this guy says in in most cases yeah it would actually it would it would run just fine and most of the jobs that you have are just worthless and i i kind of agree with him i i i i agree i kind of agree we don’t have knowledge of of it other than just personal experience but i don’t it does sound like it and it’s hard because there’s no counterfactuals so you don’t get to run the test and actually you know run you can’t split test and run run both versions and see which one ends up better um but i’ve had this inkling for a while when we were getting acquired and i we were getting acquired by twitch and as part of it they’re like hey you got to like you know basically like your whole team is going to come in for a day of interviews and that’s going to decide kind of like if we take your whole team or not and i had to do my interview as well and so i’m going in there and they’re like you know the classic job interview question a job interview structure is like i ask you a bunch of questions for 95 of it and then the last five percent of it i’m like so do you have any questions for us and then you’re supposed to say something that’s also just you showing off to like you know yeah show some other strength of yours you know in a different way and um and i had one genuine question i asked it to every single person and they were kind of like taken aback slash they thought i was kind of a jerk some people thought they reacted kind of well like oh that’s refreshing i don’t know i hadn’t really thought about it um but i could tell other people were slightly offended by my question and my question was i would say how many people work at twitch and they would be like uh you know i think we’re at 1800 or 2000 people now i said um and how many people do you think i forgot how i phrased it but it’s something like how many people do you think twitch needs to hit its goals and i was like how many people do you think should work here all right that’s how many people do work here how many people do you think should work here and people are like so i asked the ceo this question too and he was he i give him credit because he’s someone who like prioritizes the truth over being right like getting it right is way better than being right but he’s also like a kind of a fierce debater so he’s not just gonna like lay down and be like oh you know yeah you’re right i changed my opinion about things like so he like he took the question he didn’t like i would say nine out of ten ceos would get quite offended by this question because it basically implies you’ve mismanaged the company by bloating it’s a great question i would not be offended he was not offended either and he was like he was like that’s a good question he’s i think like 2 200. so he was like yeah i think we’re a little short of what we need to hit his goal and he’s like he’s and then he his take was basically like you know i’m not saying we have all the right people or the most talented people or that like there’s not people here who are under utilized or just kind of you know the fat i wasn’t really his point it was like i think we can be this much this ambitious and to do that we would need you know like 2200 awesome people like working in unison um i still think he was wrong i think we i think you know the company kind of operates i would have followed up with a few questions the first one would be okay but do you think that you need to hire 2 200 people because you know that only 10 of them are going to be actually value-add and you just have to hire the the rest in order to find that 10 and then i would say and also is it possible that you only that you think you need 2 200 because you really only need like 20 effort from all those people and that’s what your expectation is and then finally how much does redundancy come into play here how much do people are you just paying them and you just don’t want to mention to them but you’re paying them to sit on the bench and when the person next to them quits they just are ready to roll right uh yeah i didn’t i didn’t follow up that hardcore about it uh but i think those are you know very like valid valid points and also you know one thing i i kind of learned from him was like let’s take that redundancy one right it sounds bad right it sounds like oh man you’re paying a bunch of people to kind of do nothing just sit around no it’s insurance and he’s like that was exactly his take which was like i think it was on speed i was complaining how slow we were going and he’s like speed he’s like going slow sometimes a feature not a bug here and he’s like um or like innovation it’s like oh man we’re not really innovating everybody else isn’t he didn’t say this outright but i you know i gathered this through our conversations which is like there are some things we’re going to innovate on but actually the optimal strategy here is to let a bunch of startups go out and try to innovate and then if anything works either buy them or clone them like that is actually the best way for us to innovate it’s like it’s free we get way more experiments done by super caliber you know super hungry motivated people like startup founders and their teams who are liz are focused on just that one thing and they’ll try radical experiments that we would never otherwise do and we don’t have to fund it but we can sit back and watch it and then when we’re ready we can either go try to acquire them partner with them or if they don’t want to do any either of those we can build our own and just use our distribution and our brand which you know we have if we have you know x millions of users then we should be able to outcompete them from there and my issue with i think that’s actually is the optimal strategy i agree with emma i think on most things i i imagine i would totally by the way i should say i’m not putting words in his mouth this is like what i gathered from a bunch of bunch of different conversations i’m sure he would disagree with like you know forty or fifty percent of what i just said uh paraphrasing him poorly yeah and it’s just like your opinion on your takeaway my take of his takes and i uh i think i would agree with i bet i i would agree with a lot of what he thinks my issue is when you’re like a small company like under 50 people you’re all in it a lot of times you’re in it for a mission you’re in it to achieve something i think that you can get away with just being in it because people just like being in the thick of it with their friends uh like they just like the action when you get a little bit bigger i think it’s less mission oriented and you’re and it’s just a job but you still have to put on this face like this to inspire people and it kind of sucks because the truth is is like well you know i i know that you know a lot of you are only working 40 and that’s i’m okay with that i baked that into this i know that a lot of you aren’t working at all but you’re really just here in case the guy next to you quits and then hopefully you’re gonna train the next person and i know that a lot of you want to innovate and try these new things but that’s not really what we’re gonna do we’re gonna keep doing the same [ ] just a little bit better and then maybe every once in a while i’m gonna have a team that makes something totally new and i know all this but just tough and figuring out how to navigate and but have that like to say what i just said but in a really inspiring way or unfortunately just lie you gotta lie saying it is actually the best way yeah just act you got to just act and pretend and be a politician a little bit i find that to be incredibly challenging but i think it’s incredibly necessary yes you’re spot on um you’re spot on with that you are spot on with with what you just said do you think you could do it you know the i think the thing you said i said have you ever heard of dunbar’s number yeah what’s it mean again so dunbar’s number is basically it’s a 150 that’s the number and it’s meant to represent the number of different like how many people know you know like how many people you are familiar you like know their name their face how many people can one person know actually right like somebody’s like i got six thousand friends like now well you don’t really know six thousand people and so dunbar’s number was was used to be 150 it’s like in a tribe you could know 100 up up to 150 you could know everybody in the tribe past 150 you don’t know everybody on the track and then tools like social media and stuff came out that kind of like it’s like a tool for the human body to like do more so like you might be able to know and keep up with more than 150 people now because facebook makes it easy with a news feed and photos and their name is listed there and whatever you get to see it all the time i think what you’re saying is like your version of dunbar’s number which is 50 and it’s like below this is dumb pars dumpar’s number i’ll call it below 50 below 50. the people who are there are like you know down for the cause like yeah the the the larger prior obviously they care about themselves but like a bigger like one of the top factors either number one or number two can be like the cause and then like or even just like just like you know like that kid who said he wants to do hood red stuff with his friends like that that could be the cause like i just wanna i just uh there was a viral video uh like uh years ago and they interviewed this like nine-year-old who um stole his grandmother’s car and crashed it and the guy was like why did you why did you steal her car that’s that was really bad of you and he goes he goes i try to be good but sometimes i just like doing hood rat stuff with my friends like smoking cigarettes and driving cars play the video play the video bed you got to play that really quick can you play it along the way he ran over two mailboxes hit two parked cars in a costco parking lot and struck two moving cars near walmart i want to do it because it’s fun fun to do bad things drive into a car but did you know that you could perhaps kill somebody yes but i wanted to do her stuff for my friend that’s how i feel about startups the youtube feature for this podcast just took us to a whole new level already the first one is great second we need to pull the clip um yeah just sometimes i wanted to reshape with my friends and that needs to be a sound clip ben that you can just play when mirrored sam is talking about something dumb that we’re doing uh so just just go ahead and cut that one out that’s the best part about that’s the best part about startups like i don’t care if it’s ad tech i don’t care if i’m selling clothing i don’t get like it feels like when you’re when you’re like pulling [ ] off and you’re like kind of fibbing to people like yeah you know we’ve been you know we really care about our customers our team is it’s like just three of you and you know it’s like you’re just like trying to pretend that you’re a big deal like that’s hood rat [ ] and i love doing that with my friends but i wanted to do her stuff with my friend by the way have you struggled to do that uh at now that you’re a big enterprise you know sas company that’s like worth billions of dollars and hood ratchet is now frowned upon and you’re like i just yanked it i yanked it um you can’t and they’re like you just yanked it sam why did you do that we have a process for that because i definitely could think of like two or three examples where i was bragging about something i did that was like the startup scrappy thing twitch well i would just be like yeah like you know uh like for example there was like a competitor and i like went to i talked to the founder and i was like yeah like you know i basically found out a bunch of their numbers and i was like oh yeah you know they’re growing this fast this other doing blah blah and they’re like well how do you know that and i was like well i talked to my i told them i was interested in blah blah and they’re like oh uh i was like what and they’re like well you know we just usually we don’t we don’t do good wretch basically it was like the the reward i thought i was creating was like well we’re going to need to talk to legal and also corp dev is going to have to you know we have a guy whose job is to have those conversations and we we typically sign a letter of engagement before like whatever it was like not the exact example but like things that in the startup when i was doing my startup i would be so proud of my hack about like whatever or like i remember once i was negotiating a partnership deal and like basically i was like really negotiating for like every like every inch which as a startup i used to love winning a deal like doing it getting a good deal for ourselves and they were just like you know they’re like you know what like we’d rather just use our standard deal and it’s more favorable for him so he’ll be happy and we don’t have to like you let you like negotiate deal by deal on these things and like you know in general we don’t really want you negotiating directly with the person we have like partnerships with people who do that you’re like yeah but they were not negotiating you’re like the big lebowski guys like dude you need a toe i’ll get you a toe i’ll get you a toe if you need a toe you