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 i want to create a company and i want to sell it for 100 million plus to walmart or amazon in three years what opportunities exist in the e-com world 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 would you like him to do anything else for you sam the most specific question no that’s actually not that specific i feel like i can rule the world i know all right today we have mark laurie on the podcast this guy is an og of e-commerce he sold diapers.com to amazon for like i don’t know 600 million dollars he created jet.com and sold it to walmart for three and a half billion dollars good guy he came on and uh me and sam were pretty blown away like we 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 i could sell for 100 million dollars to amazon or walmart 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 going to 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 someone like when you bought the the basketball team did you just like send a huge wire um like just hearing those details are really interesting but we do a whole long 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 uh 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 we liked him so much we want him to come back on one hour was not enough and here’s what we ask you to do um 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 last name is l-o-r-e um 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 um come back on and 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 all right here’s the episode enjoy um okay cool so we have a guest here sam do you wanna you wanna team up who’s who is on the line yes so e-commerce tycoon successful billionaire and as of 2017 is exceptionally jacked in bulb mark i have to ask you which of these is your favorite part of jeff bezos [Laughter] sam’s been polishing that one up for the last hour no uh mark lori we have um mark you’ve done a lot of stuff you’ve started four different things right four different startups that have uh successfully exited the most popular one is probably a few more that are in stealth that i’m really excited about maybe i can share a little bit about but yeah we want to we want to learn all about it but the biggest one was um jet.com that’s one probably everyone knows uh before that you did diapers.com which you sold to amazon for 550 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 i think no jet definitely i mean stock doubled uh 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 um i bought the stock because i was like yeah there’s plenty of room to run here for walmart e-commerce and uh yeah i feel like i was a part of the company i won a little bit as well just off the news and you um and then you also sold a company called the pit uh which is called the tops that was like for 5.7 right back in the day in the day and uh 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 200 meter and 400 meter what was your uh well i ran uh uh high 21’s in the 200 and uh 448 for the 400. same with me almost exactly the same yeah high 21s high 48s exactly yeah i got slower as the distance but longer and 400 was was sort of long i was better at sort of the 60 yard and and uh and 100 and 200 but yeah what was her 100 meter pr uh 1074. wow and was that fat did they do 74 yeah wow well that’s pretty you’re moving 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’ve done a lot of stuff um you’ve done you’ve done a ton of research you’ve done you’ve done a ton of stuff in the past but even the stuff you’re doing now is also interesting you just you guys made a bid for the timberwolves right yeah we actually it went through so we signed an agreement so yeah we’re just going through the nba approval process now and then hope to close like probably in like six weeks was that a um a dream like you know i’ve had this dream as a kid you know own an nba team that’s that’s the point of doing business you know as 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 going to be that sport it’s not going to be this first you know and then i was like oh maybe you know uh it would be uh decathlete you know and go to the olympics and i was like okay that’s not going to happen i’m like all right forget it you know what i’m just gonna like one day own a team that’s what i’ll do that’s amazing that was the dream you know i was a huge sports fan growing up followed every sport watched every game you know it was a huge knicks fan and then you know i had two kids and you know life happens and you sort of get a little bit detached from sports but i love it i’m excited to like dive back in and have a reason it’s it seems like back in it seems like i don’t know 10 15 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 kind of like lifelong dream and i think it’s obviously still like kind of a passion thing but also the business merits 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 30 of them and there’s sort of more billionaires and there are teams so give me a pie chart is this what percentage of this was just i just want to have it it’s like art versus this is actually a good business position how do you think about that yeah it’s probably 80 the former 20 good investment like yeah it’s it’s not so much about being a great investment just not going to lose money i’m going to have a lot of fun anytime you can 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 a lot of money i kind of like this you know where it’s it’s uh have a lot of fun and maybe make a little bit of money too it’s like perfect but i’m excited about 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 how do you move to like dynamic announcing so you can choose your announcer dynamic real-time ticketing i want people to move to any open seat in the stadium at any time like i’ve got all these like tech ideas on how to 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 even you know what’s the moneyball version of of in basketball too you know like as a mid-market team how do you win what’s the strategy thinking that through uh how do you uh 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 gotten 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 i 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 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 and i did diverse.com you know i i didn’t know anything about the pit 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 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 like wow this is a big vision everyone agrees this is freaking huge okay great how are we going to 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 p part and it’s finding a great ceo and a great executive leadership team setting the values setting the mission the corporate culture 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 kind of just sit back then you’re there as a strategic advisor i think if you’re trying to sit you know micromanage and make decisions um when you don’t have the experience that’s where you get in trouble you 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 going to work i just don’t i think who is the very best you know uh person in the world 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 who are 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 exactly where you’re going what what the the north star is and you’ve got great people and they’re happy and they’re empowered great things will happen and that allows me to do multiple things at the same time now because you know i’m not getting into the weeds of it a lot of your companies um how much do you guys raise at diapers.com diapers raised 55 million okay so that’s a lot but not close to i mean jet was what like a bill i mean you guys raised uh yeah like 800 million so substantially larger although though both are quite large this idea of being able to hire the best in the world and being able to hide people hire people to do to to do a lot of the work that they specialize in could you have done that if you were bootstrapping your companies no i mean that that’s why you know we started alex and i um hey rod just started a venture fund called vcp vision capital people we believe that there’s a really big hole in the market for people with big visionary ideas 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 it’s a little bit of chicken and egg how do you get the capital unless you have the team you can’t hire the team until they have the capital but you don’t get enough capital until you prove it and so you get a million bucks and then you get five million bucks then you get 10 million bucks and each step of the way you’re sort of on a tight wire type right you know you you’re basically like one little thing goes wrong so the investors lose confidence where you under uh over promise and under deliver lots of things 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 going to do this at the right time to do it let’s not under capitalize it here’s 10 million seed go out and hire the best team in the world that puts you in a position to have the best shot of a really successful business if you got the best people you got the capital and you have the vision right you’re a player now you’re kind of like worst case you’re going to exit this somebody’s going to pick it up because you’ve got great people and it’s the right time it’s a big vision so what do you what do you think when so there’s there’s the case where jet where that clearly is what happened and it worked and then you see like quibby 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 uh big vision hey we’re gonna you know rethink netflix for mobile and didn’t quite hit it and they’re burning a lot of money so even though they raised a lot their burn still left them with i don’t know how many 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 it’s just a numbers game it doesn’t always work out or do you think there’s something different in the strategy that maybe they could have done or you’ve done differently that that leads to better results yeah um i don’t know that intimately do you know the story and i do think that’s probably more the exception than the rule i mean i think listen startups don’t all work so some of them are work do i think it had a higher probability of working because it was a big vision they had a lot of capital 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 the most talented people in the organization fully committed an all-in to it that’s the only that’s the only thing i wonder i don’t know um 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 necessarily the person that’s doing the vcp at the top but who is that person and and and you know do you have the the right team to support so i don’t know the end of that that’s where i’d probably wonder and so me and sam talk about this a lot because uh you know we think about art 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 want to do and one of the paths is similar to you where you as an entrepreneur you sort of can see these opportunities and you could be you can be the spark that helps start them but you’re not necessarily going to be the day-to-day operator in the weeds maybe like you were with your first startup right and um 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 getting the capital in and then recruiting the right people on the people part take us into a job interview with you so um obviously there’s the standard stuff you know you ask what they’ve done i’ve hired 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 uh over the years and it’s changed my thinking has changed on hiring people resumes and i’ve i’ve gone from you know early in my career when i first started you know i just want to feel like i want to have a beer with this person right i realize how wrong that is and people make that mistake today and at least to all kinds of unconscious buyers and things like that it’s the worst possible thing to do i spend an incredible amount of time up front on resume reading which i never used to do before 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 interview them 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 kind of just discount that for the most part there might be a select couple people that i really trusted like you work with this person trust me they’re they’re top five percent okay but that’ll show on the resume and so when i look at the resume like i’m looking for a demonstrable 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 they go into into a company um if if they’re there for a few years did they get promoted like what did the trajectory look like and then the most important part when they leave that company and go to a new company is it something that a top five percenter would do top five percent is move in a certain way that you start to learn machine learning these these uh you know trends um and top five percenters top ten percentage of the elite people when they move they move in step fashion it’ll be a bigger title much bigger role a better company and they’ll get in that and they will be promoted multiple times and then they’ll leave it’ll be another step change and so i’m looking for that like multi-company 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 won’t even interview so a lateral move out right you know move from uh uh a google to kmart sorry kmart but out like i just i anything any little like tap that says 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 going to interview because you know what there’s a chance i get honey potted right honey potted everyone’s everyone experienced this you basically bring somebody in for an interview the resume is maybe not ideal they come in you spend one hour with them and you just really like them and they throw some buzzwords around they’ve gotten old experience and you’re like hired think about that i mean you’re committing to like 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 hunting potted many times in the past and i unless that resume screams superstar which again it’s only five out of a hundred resumes if you say top five percent or ten out of ten 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 i know that they’re a superstar on the resume and so i can focus primarily on core values and they’re spotted traits so spotic is an acronym i come up with for traits i look for in people i hire smart passionate optimistic tenacious adaptable kind and empathetic and the last two are really important kind in kindness and empathy i found over the years that you can get somebody that’s super tenacious passion they’ll run through a brick wall but also run through people over people and they’re not you find somebody that has the passion they’re optimistic and tenacious and adaptable because you need that in startup 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 and so those are the things and the interview questions have nothing to do i want to ask one traditional interview question they’ll all be questions to open them up to to try to get at what makes them tick and do they exhibit these traits and you know i have this theory like uh 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 and um i sort of found like 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 me the lowest in supply and uh and have a pretty outsized impact in startups and those two are uh energy or like enthusiasm i think bringing energy to the table every day is quite contagious 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 so the courage to either build something new uh say say something that’s on your mind um to like not let you know something that’s below our standards go uh courage i feel is in an extremely short supply take risk too right i call it boldness we call it bull at our company but yeah do you feel like when you meet people is there something you’re just like ah i wish more people had x what is x for you that you feel like is in short you know i mean what you said there so when i say you know passionate and optimism i think um optimism isn’t you know uh the sort of the optimism that allows you to be bold and take risk and it’s that optimism that you believe not only great things can happen um 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 it allows you to trust which is one of the core values in in in in all my companies i think trust is really important if you want to create a culture where the company trusts the employees the employers trust the company that’s really important to create an environment where people are happy and feel empowered and they feel a sense of ownership trust is so i have this idea that you know a lot of people say oh trust of course trust but verify and i don’t believe in the but verify right i think you start out trusting people um and until they prove otherwise and it’s very risky because you can get burned but i’ve seen the power of the upside of trusting somebody before they’ve necessarily proven that they deserve it it’s incredibly powerful motivator and i’ve seen it in my personal life i’ve seen it in business people want to they want to run through a wall for you when you’re like wait you trust me but you can i can burn you i can yeah but i trust you are you going to burn me of course not you know you’re trusting me i’m not going to burn you that is an incredible value that i’ve learned it’s it’s trust transparency being really open with your employees not hiding not secretive here’s the cap table here’s the rounds of financing here’s the numbers here’s all the information you need this i’m an open book what do you want to know like there’s no secrets here you right work this company you’re an owner you have stock options trust transparency and the other one is fairness that it’s really important that people feel in order to create an inclusive a diverse workforce you have to create a safe work environment where people feel safe coming to work they have to feel like it’s fair there should never be this feeling of like that’s not fair that’s why i have a open comp system where everybody knows what everybody else is making and everybody at the same level makes the same amount of money so women minorities everybody makes the same there’s no 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 and they don’t feel like giving you everything they’ve got and so i kind of 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 in people you hire and when you kind of get that right i think it’s it’s a magical 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 his high school track days sam yeah what place your confidence comes from it’s actually just trial and error failing a lot early on it’s it’s you know you know well just somebody i want to have a beer with it’s making those mistakes it’s getting honey potted it’s uh 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 earlier in my career because i you know i see everyone makes the same mistakes 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 kind of did but i was kind of like well the person said they were good i liked them and so i hired them um you have to be really um you know like extremely focused and uh selective in in that the other thing by the way it does help with unconscious bias too if you’re you know inclined um when 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 sort of help there so i i wanna i wanna ask you about i mean i think we gotta 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 96 right uh no it was 99. okay what and then i’m looking at some information here on on your timeline you started this thing called the pit the pit was a well it was it was in the internet marketing yeah it was basically a sports stock market we used uh to avoid gambling you know we used baseball card as the proxy for the athlete but essentially it was meant to be a sort of sport 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 2000. if you guys remember like went down like i don’t know 80 or something and uh yeah there was no way to raise any venture money and we only started it maybe 10 months earlier and we’re able we raised 5 million and sold it for 5.7 and everyone’s like yeah do it this is a great exit and we’re like okay well then we’ll do it again let’s that’s great we’ll sell this and get the next idea that’s what i was going to 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 raised a fair bit at least for a six million dollar experience just i think it was just you know the tops at the time was interested in in the people that we hired we hired a great team we had a we had a vision for what we wanted um and they were there to provide some capital so yeah so let’s talk about some ideas that you would need optimism about now right so uh 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 empire of amazon so but we’ll come back to that i want to start with where do you need to be optimistic today what are you optimistic what ideas are i know you’ve talked about startup cities i don’t know if that’s the one you want to 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 i mean gravitate toward tend to gravitate more towards b2c businesses business to consumer i just like consumer businesses and i think it’s easier to understand some of those businesses than sort of more like uh you know if you were like a biomedical company or something like that it’s harder to wrap arms around i think there’s more so most of the ideas and things in thinking i do is in the b2c world across lots of different industries i’ve made a number of investments uh and i’m involved with a few companies i’m really excited about um one is archer which is the basically they’re like passenger drones so i think i think it’s like basically an autonomous uh electric helicopter um that basically flies passengers you know around it’s it’s safer than hell is this a spec that you did yeah yeah it did us back a couple months ago and um going through the sec process now that’s crazy super exciting that was a great vcp um so the the two founders you know came over it actually sit on the couch right here and they said we got this vision for these flying cars these these drones that carry passengers it’s the right time this is why it’s the right time mark this is how big the industry’s going to be this is why it’s going to work this is why the technology is right and i was really taken by the vision i thought they had it nailed um and they said hey we need 5 million now we’re going to hire the best engineers in the world we’re going to take them from the best companies we’re going to go raise 50 million and build the state of the art the latest and greatest of these of these aircraft and i thought the two founders were exceptional so great start to the to the founding to the p part of the vcp and i thought okay i’ll give them the 5 million and i’ll help them you know hire this this team and i’ll help them raise the 50. and then you’re on your own right that’s what we did i put five in we helped raise you know helped hire the the engineering talent helped them raise 50 million and that was two years ago and then they just raised a billion through the spac and so now it’s a 4 billion 3.7 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 seed can’t hire the great team the chicken and egg thing it’s like here’s five and then let’s get the team and simultaneously go and raise 50. so right very short order they had 55 million dollars and they had the best 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 massive tam um and so i’m looking at opportunities like that um and i can tell you some other ones too yeah i go yeah yeah well another one that was in the news is is basically mobile kitchens so looking at the trends in food delivery and millennials and gen z not wanting to cook and one food delivered and things you know i just saw that you know it sort of takes a long time to get it delivered inconsistent the quality suffers in transit and it’s expensive and i thought oh if you can solve those three things um and how do you do it well what if you cooked in a mobile kitchen if the restaurant basically came to you and it cooked in your driveway hot much faster because the trucks already on the road and so they’re they’re likely just minutes away and uh and so i made a pretty big bet uh on that company and uh you know it’s still in stealth mode but i’m really excited about it i think how how’s that different than a food truck so so it’s a mobile kitchen but it’s for multiple types of food or each mobile kitchen is a different restaurant different cuisine okay um and uh the idea is to is to get the best restaurant of that cuisine in the country and sort of bring it to a central central place you know it’s high quality food that’s piping hot that’s you know delivered to your door fast that that’s an exciting i think a big tam big market food that’s where the puck’s going um i think there’s there’s uh lots of things lots happening now with uh laws changing in sports gambling and things i think there’s really big opportunities there to maybe bring back some of what i did before um what what what was that exactly what you said you talked about the pit yeah you said bringing it back before no just in in new now with the gambling laws changing things i think it’s an opportunity to create a true sport stock market and do it right like where it really feels like you’re buying and selling players like stock um by by leveraging some of the changes in gambling laws have you seen uh 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 oh my gosh uh john you want to explain i mean it’s pretty much what it’s kind of what you’re describing um what they did was they basically took twitter and they turned it into a social network where you don’t just follow the person you can invest in them so the cool thing about this was what they did was let’s say on twitter i have like i don’t know 140 000 followers so from day one what they did is they took the top 10 000 twitter accounts and they had raised i think 150 million dollars from vcs here in silicon valley and they used it 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 big cloud if you claim your account and verify it uh like basically meaning you tweet out that hey this is my big clout i walked into like 75k uh worth of my own coin right worth of my own stock and others were already buying it because they were saying hey if sean joins we think that he might you know continue to grow his following and so we want to invest so the idea being we’ve all had this experience where you discover a band early or an athlete early or 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 and um 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 star themselves 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 intrinsic value they don’t have a ton of interesting 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 of people and a thousand people 100 bucks in my coin i can then basically reward my shareholders so in you know in the stock market you give out a dividend or um 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 earned this month my shareholders are gonna uh you know get get their proportionate share i could also say hey we’re gonna do a version of this podcast um that only my shareholders get to listen to right like like only fans or or these different products that sort of say if you if you’re a subscriber of mine then you get the content so you can kind of pay wall of the content dynamic membership almost like a membership i can come up with whatever the perks are for my members and so then the creators all jockey to offer better value to their holders because their stock appreciates the more incentive incentivizing they make it now this is a one in a hundred hundred a thousand idea but i do think there’s something interesting 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 20-year 30-year like the intrinsic value like how it ultimately this could be a great exit and yeah like i think with gambling uh laws changing there’s a way to give players intrinsic value so you basically basically say at the end of somebody’s career 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 the 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 that’s interesting so you so you could say um so the house basically sets the line right uh let’s say zion comes into the league and we say okay the house believes the zion you know the market the line gets set that zion’s gonna be a hall of fame player and maybe that means x y and z stats this mvp’s this many points whatever it is do you think it’s better than that right you buy if you think if you think that’s not going to happen you don’t buy are you short and basically the careers so you get to predict the player’s uh journey and then the better than it’s like a super fan basically as the better they perform you feel like you’re being vindicated and you’re actually going to economically benefit from having identified somebody who’s going to perform higher than what the market thinks that’s cool yeah exactly what um i i think i read somewhere that you like to look at google trends a lot like you’re you’re and and because you’re a serial entrepreneur you invest in a lot of you’re always looking for trends you’re always looking for what’s popular what i want to know is what what do you use like what signals do you look for to figure out where you’re going to go to and also what signal told you that jet was interesting because a lot of people probably said don’t even think about doing this like you’re you know you’re i imagine a lot of people are like amazon or walmart or someone already owns the space what are you crazy this is like an impossible feat yeah no it’s two different things i mean i think with jet i’d been intimately involved in retail you know with diapers.com and wag and selling it to amazon and working inside amazon and i just felt like huge market huge tailwind it’s the ecom’s gonna continue to grow at double digit for the next five ten years um and i just believed that there wasn’t you know it wasn’t a winner take all that there was room for another player um and i thought we can raise a significant amount of capital and hire a great team so we had this really big vision with this tailwind 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 going to happen either it works your exit a 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 you’ve got an asset that in worst case is going to be worth more than the capital you raised that’s that’s my mentality with these things um 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 um not a ton of money you don’t have the best people but you spend enough money that is kind of expensive for somebody to buy as a strategic it’s not really worth it you know people tend to buy it’s the barbell strategy they’ll buy the aqua hire you raise 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 10 million he’s 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 uh be big enough to matter to a really big company that has the capital to put down hundreds of millions or billions in an acquisition there’s a lot of people in like the in the middle and that’s what vcp is that’s why it’s like no 10 million 50 million let’s hire the very best team if it’s the right market there’s going to be a buyer for it right and that’s kind of the strategy what’s interesting is so when i sold my company we never revealed the price but let’s just say that like hypothetically it was like 30 or 40 million dollars um i noticed that i i just for a sake of argument that a a deal in that size it seemed like it was as hard of work as if i sold it for 400 billion dollars you know it’s harder that’s hard i think it’s harder 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 hell but it’s not just the work on your side i think what he’s pointing out is that the price tag is significant where the company can’t just cut the check real quick right like you could with a small aqua hire but you don’t have enough of an asset 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’s right it’s always hard as an entrepreneur really tough place yeah yeah well i’m saying that that’s just one of the reasons why it was hard it was hard for many reasons really hard you must be a really good entrepreneur because it’s really hard i think to exit in that middle ground like it’s hard to exit most companies in that middle ground 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 10 to 100 million and the entrepreneurs i know that have exited in that in that space there they’re strong they’re like really strong well so that’s 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 20 to 30 that’s like bite size ish that’s like uh 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 it’s actually probably easier to be a little bit more audacious yeah 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 goal is to build wealth and have a good life it’s probably best maybe not to raise any money uh and never sell and just try to build the company over a long period of time but let’s say you were you um but you don’t have your brand name right so 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 21 but you don’t have the reputation uh but you do have the same sort of mindset that you have today you have the same knowledge let’s say 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 the large amount of money just through charisma and hustle and vision uh 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 21 again today without the reputation yeah 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 really original or something nobody’s thinking about it nobody’s doing or something niche or like and that’s kind of what it is it’s niche and the venture capitalists are like it’s not that interesting you know um and i’ve learned that it doesn’t need to be something like niche or super inventive it could be just find a really big tam like just say something like okay health care okay and what’s a really big idea like where’s the puck going in healthcare i would study where the venture capitalists are investing what types of companies i do the research like where is the money going follow kind of the money because that’ll kind of give you some idea of where where some of these trends are right now and uh 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 not like inventive or super original just like just a little hook of something different that’s not being done and put together a big vision that requires ultimately hundreds of millions of capital and work backwards from that and say okay you know that we think this is going to be a multi-billion dollar opportunity you know we’re going to you know start with 10 million we’re going to hire this here’s division here’s how we’re going to get there work on that plan and that pitch deck i’d spend hundreds of hours on that deck and on the vision and mapping it out and somebody will bite because it’s the right time it’s the right space you know if you’re really good and 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 you’ll get that that 10 million dollar c check to go hire a great team and you talked about you’ve talked about where’s the puck going uh 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 you know kitty hawk we and you know uber was working on it a bunch of people working on this maybe there’s something there um i’ll give you a couple more yeah so one i think conversational commerce so in retail i think the next big step change is the idea that you would use text and voice 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 of a specialty retailer you want to 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 um so hyper personalized this idea of getting a one best answer um the idea of like search engine 20 years from now is going to 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 you have 10 000 responses and you had to like read reviews and look at all this and search and filter that’s not the way it’s going to be done you’re basically just going to say hey i need a i need a toaster um how much i don’t know what’s a good amount uh 200 bucks you get a great toaster really good okay great wanna make a recommendation boom buy it and it just ships it right like it’s gonna be very conversational and the the we talk a lot about personalization and detail but nobody’s even close to doing it in a way that it’s going to be done in the future and i think voice requires one best answer otherwise voice doesn’t work you can’t give you 100 things it’s voice it’s got to be like you know if you were asking your your best friend hey like you know i know you know toasters like what should i get man you know like that kind of thing it should be very uh 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 who’s got the world-class team who’s raised you know significant capital you know nothing but is there a 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 um it was basically this for new york city uh primarily parents and it was gangbusters i mean it was like you know people stopped using amazon prime it was they just dropped it it’s all the shopping the entire the entire while chair uh 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 people loved it and it was a great test it was very expensive because in order to get the comments to see the conversations um uh sorry you need to see a lot of 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 past tense did it go away or that still exists no it went away but it was expensive yeah it was expensive and there just wasn’t the right time for walmart right but i think if for in a startup world yeah i think i think it’s totally different because walmart maybe doesn’t want to you know invest hundreds of millions or billions but a startup totally different doesn’t hit your income statement everyone gets the gate knows it you put capital to work and you build something great so there’s that i think in healthcare too i think like things i was talking about with telehealth and all the stuff coming together i think the idea of like um people taking control of their health uh with home diagnostics and things like there should be a dashboard that exists you can look up i put in my name okay mark lori here’s my dashboard i’ve got a number of gadgets in the home that i do on a weekly and 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 um you know a little prick of blood and monitor blood sugar uh 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 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 heart attack risk that you’re running your cholesterol is 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 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 what 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 there’s no diagnostics it’s like you have to go to the professional there’s no home stuff i think all that’s going to change in the future i do think people are going to like really take control of their their health in a completely different way and they’re going to be doing things other than brushing their teeth to take care of themselves on a daily basis 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 going to seem like cavemen how we we operate today good there’s got to be certain things you get tested certain times you know my daughter had celiac disease we didn’t figure it out until she was nine years old like that’s i mean it’s not that rare of a disease like some doctors should have been like hey here are the here are the things you do here the probabilities 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 50 and um and she’s like yeah as a kid everyone was like oh i don’t know 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 just like nobody ever knew 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 until i was 50 when i found out exactly everyone should have genetic profile you know that gives changes your probabilities based on genetics everyone should have that it should be you know tests 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 feel like it’s not organized at all yeah well you got like uh like a whoop and then an aura ring and i have a smart scale i’ve got uh like a glucose blood a continuing blue glucose blood monitoring i’ve got a smart bed uh like i’ve got like 18 different smart things but they are quite siloed but they don’t actually tell me the answer they just you know like they don’t actually say like uh th this is what this all means yeah you know maybe they’ll say like you’re extra stressed this morning sleep more or don’t work out as hard or your body fat is too high but uh it’s kind of limited to like pretty high level stuff yeah it should it should be way more structured you should have 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 the doctor doesn’t just say like you know it takes a long time before the doctor’s like you should do a sleep apnea study or something like totally there’s things you can have devices that are listening near your bed that can know it sounds that sounds like well i always thought it was weird like 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 and 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 [ ] yeah you could have known this like instantly you know and that’s kind of like crazy to me mri by the way there’s mri scans and you do your whole body skin and like detailed 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 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 of 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 all right now it’s now it’s you know i like asking these questions because i like knowing like what meets your standards but basically who in this space are you looking at where you’re saying that’s kind of promising is there any like one or two companies yeah i i don’t i kind of maybe i should more but i i really spend a lot of time just thinking about like a complete sometimes sometimes i if you know too much about a space it’s hard to clean slate and invent because you’re 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 on what is you know these trends are happening telehealth 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 and when it’s really big you know nobody’s doing it and then you can reverse engineer and go back and say there any people that are working on certain things that could be helpful to it but you got to go so big that you know that nobody’s playing there and that’s where i think the opportunity lies it’s yeah it’s going to need billions of dollars to pull it off you’re going to have to prove it in a in a small area uh it’s going to be very expensive but then when you prove it it extrapolates out to a trillion dollar business like market cap opportunity yeah yes i don’t i don’t i couldn’t tell you like i’m not like tell you all the different little components that exist right now something that you said earlier was basically you kind of like reverse engineer a little bit from like you’d be like i’m gonna find where the money’s going then i’m gonna build this deck and i’m gonna um raise money and then go build the thing um what’s something that let’s say that i said mark i want to create a company and i want to sell it for 100 million plus to walmart or amazon in three years what opportunities exist in the e-com world 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 for you sam the most specific question no that’s actually not that specific a lot i mean a lot i’m not i don’t work at amazon i don’t know 100 million in three years yeah no i so well you said one personalized shopping conversation that’s coverage i think that’s that’s not likely a hundred million that is like way bigger or it’s or it’s not exist like that’s a little bit more binary i don’t think a hundred million necessarily impossible sorry i hundred billion was just some three years i think it needs to be um a sort of a niche technology that could that’s where the puck’s going that’s going to be helpful to differentiate it’s going to be something three years is fast so it’s going to have to be tech more than having shown real market traction but it’s going to have to be a technology that’s probably hard to build that involves you know ai the thing that comes to mind would be like fit analytics this idea that you’re going online and you’re buying um you know a address 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 40 it’s very expensive for retailers and it’s a pain in the you know for people to buy stuff bring it try it on to send it back and things so the idea that you know my body dimensions and use artificial intelligence to know the inside dimensions of the garment to see exactly how it’s going to lay in my body without having to try it on to cut down return rates dramatically there’s billions of dollars that you can save retailers there and apparel is definitely um an area where where there’s a lot of focus and um like that’s just wanting to off the top of my head i love that that’s a great answer that’s a great answer there there’s i still i saw this guy in japan um he’s a billionaire 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 body suit for twenty dollars and these bull these white dots on this black body suit would uh you know like in a video game where they motion capture you yeah yeah yeah yeah that’s what it was and it would it the camera was able to tell uh 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 but i was like oh that’s kind of an interesting listen for every idea out there there’s hundreds of people trying that’s why it’s never really about the idea it’s about execution it’s about vcp so are they under capitalized do they have the best team in the world and quippy i know you said that in the beginning but other examples of you know big vision right time massive tam like raise it a lot of and have the world-class team that’s all-in are there there’s not that many examples i could think of in fact when i think of those examples they’re usually examples of things that have worked that worked yeah i don’t experience that many times where you have a world-class team ton of and a big vision at the right time those companies get acquired because mind was a good example of this uh deep mind got deep mind it was an ai company got acquired by google for 500 million when you know no usage yet it was just vision and team and then i think deepmind they said that once they’ve plugged it in to they do the fun stuff like they’ll go beat 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 adwords um machine learning and i think it’s generated like incremental multiple billions of dollars already for google just on the slight optimization of adwords and uh 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 looks awesome in the demo but they haven’t executed it well enough where it actually works yeah or you could argue also a little a little bit early yeah at that same exact company like today going forward right could be totally different game so it is kind of interesting it would be great to to map out vcp against companies that have worked and didn’t work to see what the hit rate is right sorry guys i’m realizing i have a four o’clock yeah you gotta run okay uh 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 yeah 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 finally just launched instagram and and start becoming more active there but linkedin is probably the best place right now yeah all right mark this was thank you for coming on all right thanks guys thank you it went way too fast yeah it was good but uh it ended quickly i wanted i had so much more we could have talked to you i had so much i think i think we should actually hit him up and be like dude after after this episode goes out and he gets some love we should 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 was it seems like he seems like a great guy he his uh he ha man he’s really charismatic i get like why i understand why he’s successful he would be dr he would be describing an idea off the cuff 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 uh 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 so let’s talk about okay so first uh i really love that coverage i thought that was great i thought yes i agree i thought he was great and i thought he made for a great guest um especially the second half his setup was bad i cannot stand with people i think he was talking to a cis on a phone or a laptop with someone who’s so successful like he is why do they not have awesome zoom setups yeah it’s crazy to me uh 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 uh you know i i just sort of speak out loud i don’t even type anymore that’s my that’s my uh uh bray who just said he doesn’t own a computer was he i think he was that true or are you just bullshitting in the chat that’s 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 the most rich is they don’t own a computer nor do they even touch a computer their emails get printed out for them and they either hand write or just say things out loud and people go relay the messages i think he’s one notch below that or he doesn’t own a computer he just does [ ] off his phone that’s weird to me i mean not weird because i mean if you’re a baller go ahead b baller ball out but like what if you just want to type a long essay or you want to or if you want to just clubs like us can’t understand the the feeling where you don’t need to type nothing ever or or you just want to like search the web and like go and read it like it just seems like easy to have if you took my computer away forget the work i would be so bored i like need to like you know browse the internet yeah that’s crazy so he doesn’t own a computer that’s pretty cool uh yeah the guy’s awesome he said 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 he was gonna say i think we slowplayed it 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 i don’t usually do takeaways because i don’t think like i don’t know i just don’t bother usually usually it’s not like i really learned so much that i really want to do takeaways i was just kind of entertained but in this i actually did have a few takeaways i thought i’m just going to rattle them off insight number one 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 and i think that that’s true it feels very true from my experiences and i’ve never heard anybody like kind of say it out loud um so i thought that was that was a good insight i liked that basically what he i i don’t think you summarized it or i don’t think you said everything basically he said it’s easier to sell a company for like he actually said 10 million or under or like hundreds of millions right exactly um and the reason why is you know the small one you can kind of cut the check just on talent the big one you’re buying like kind of a more fleshed out asset of technology or traction or talent unique talent and in the middle he’s like you’ve usually raised enough money where like your price your asking price is too high for them to just just do it without blinking but you don’t have enough proof and enough of an asset that they can like justify you know a big strategic purchase and so that’s actually the hardest one and 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 where the next thing they chase they’re going to go bigger um but they didn’t get enough where they’re just satisfied and going to go chill on the couch or on an island somewhere and um they’ve been through it but they’re not uh they’re not done and i think that that’s what he was kind of saying which is like those entrepreneurs are the ones you want to bet on i also when i invest that’s like a great signal to me is when somebody has had a small win under their belt or a medium-sized win i should say yeah i had um andrew chen very successful asic’s uh andreessen partners said some of the most he said the most dangerous uh entrepreneur is someone who’s uh somewhat wealthy enough that they uh that they’re set but they have a huge chip on their shoulder exactly and he goes for example travis before he started uber uh you know he had red swoosh which was like a kind of tens of millions win um ev williams before you know he had blogger and you know that’s a good win but you know went for more and there’s a bunch of examples mark cuban did the same thing right okay some other things i thought he was interesting so his model i didn’t realize this beforehand but his model is basically it’s kind of like moonshots it’s basically he’s anti the traditional playbook of silicon valley which is raised 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 find the biggest market you can go after 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 huge market and growing double digits um 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 going to be on execution and you do want to have like a new hook or like kind of like the 10 to 20 that’s that’s innovative but like 80 is the same as other players in the market and so he was saying 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 um 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 but i thought it was a great question the reason i left it was a great question and he actually gave a great answer but you asked like what’s a company i could start and in three years sell for 100 million dollars to amazon walmart it was like so specific that i was like it’s almost like hey mark like i don’t want to think just tell me what to do and i’ll go do it like it was such a such a solved my problem for me i just laughed well it was uh what was the word that you said the other day or uh orthogonal orthogonal it was my orthogonal way of asking uh of asking um what is a problem that big ecom businesses have yeah that they that they have that what are problems that need to be solved i’ll paint that yeah that was my way of asking that you have a great answer he gave a great answer the answer he actually gave a previous answer where he said something like a conversational uh commerce which is a really cool thing he’ll explain but the answer that he gave for was uh oh uh fitting virtual fitting yeah virtual fitting so he gave a ton of really cool answers and and the guy this guy uh mark laurie who was the uh he started jet.com which he sold for three and a half billion where and then he was the ceo or uh president of walmart ecom and then he uh before that he had sold the company for 600 million dollars to amazon so like his his his his perspective is like about almost as great as it can be yes exactly um so i thought that was really and i liked um i liked some of his stuff on the interviews kind of like job interview side i think i 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 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 um like safe like nobody can disagree the things he was saying were good um 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 um 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 is he doing it well it’s like it’s always he’s got great people underneath them doing all those individual projects on a day-to-day basis all right 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 at 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 um you know like if you can if he can go i don’t want to be in the weeds of anything i don’t want to be in the weeds of my marriage parenting the weeds are the weeds bro i don’t want to be in the weeds i only want to be in the weeds of the things that i want to be in uh 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 it he’s like look i have the vision i hire the initial people and i raise a ton of money and i just deploy that money and make everyone else uh specialize in what there’s what they specialize in but 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 um how do you figure out what that vision should be and he talked about a couple things he’s like i look at where the trends are where’s the puck 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 are breakthrough technologies and so it’s either like a technology like ai machine learning okay cool i can apply that in another industry or everything’s a bunch of people pouring money into e-commerce okay e-commerce is probably really big or education healthcare is really big all right that’s a big space now how do i go create the most bold vision that has like you know a slightly novel hook 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 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 healthcare 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 that hey you should get this checked with a doctor or you should improve this and um and i thought the kind of like just from a mind of a customer instead of like industry research i thought yeah 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 all right 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 uh does that partially satisfy customer okay that’s good enough and i wanted to ask him about air uh about amazon and working with bezos and things like that i i wonder what his opinion will be buying the timberwolves i feel like there’s more we could do there because he bought a sports team you know one thing this is a crazy story that i’ll just share here i didn’t get to bring it up with him but but uh ben found this when he was doing some research for this was he he goes um 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 a contest about um 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 and some guy went and did it and he he basically just did like kind of like paid marketing 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 20 million when it sold and so this guy turned 18 grand and did 20 million as a fan of the company outside the company probably made more than anyone else in the company besides mark which is amazing to me i remember that story and i was one of those people trying to uh this was like you participated in this oh definitely you didn’t you didn’t participate like if you were just it was so robin hood did a good job of this uh i believe it was robin hood um clubhouse has done a pretty good job but like basically robin hood’s campaign right before they launched was you’re on the waiting list refer five people to move up the spot right uh this was jet’s version of that although jet was first i believe uh then robin before robin hood and it went incredibly viral if i remember correctly i think they had billboards promoting this the contest yeah do you remember that uh when you would i think we should have asked him about this all right we’ll save this one for next time but i thought this is an amazing 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 quick update uh we’re going to miami i think in uh eight days or something june 4th uh we sold 300 tickets uh that’s great i think we have we have a few left right we’re releasing maybe what 80 more hundred more something like that yeah we moved it to uh 400 it was 300 we moved it to 400. um we’ll see what happens all right if you want to come see us if you want us to autograph your dollar bills bring them to miami uh june 4th uh i don’t know how they should find the eventbrite just go to uh mfmpot or myfirstmillionpod.mfmpod.com uh and put in your email we’ll email you the details right yeah and there’ll be a link on there if you go to mfnpod.com and also if you just follow one of us on twitter you could definitely see the links where we’re promoting it and do us a favor if you liked this episode with mark when we post it um we’re going to post it i don’t know i guess go on linkedin and we i want to shower him with love of people being like dude this was great come back on and then he’ll come back on so we’ll we need to game linkedin a little bit i might have to dust off the old linkedin password to go and uh and because that’s the thing when guests come on they i’ve consistently heard this from the very beginning of this podcast which 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 worked that was amazing it worked they’re they’re down to do whatever and come back on or do whatever else and you only need about 10 20 30 like you don’t need a significant amount right um 20 emails in one day being like i loved it i love you is a lot of emails for for most people it feels like it feels like a million so mark’s name is 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 million amazing yeah go go go hammer his linkedin comments or something like that i could be what i want to i put my law in it like no days off on a road less travel never looking back