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Kind: captions Language: en okay I have an amazing story if you’re if you’re entrepreneurial Sam if you have a pulse in your body if there is a blood single blood vessel in your body you are going to be fired the [ ] up after this I don’t know what you got what do you have scheduled after this cancel [Music] it all right let’s hear it what is it all right so you probably heard of this company boom Super Sonic yes yeah uh I had the opportunity to invest in this company years ago and I didn’t have any money then but also I even if I did I would have passed on this it’s it’s a it’s a ridiculous proposition I didn’t have any courage then either that was the real problem well like a guy said that a guy Silicon Valley said he’s going to build a commercial airline uh he’s going to build a jet that can be a supersonic commercial airplane right that sounds ridiculous exactly so the the thing that’s going viral right now is former like Groupon product manager cuz he worked at Groupon is LinkedIn literally goes Groupon product manager then created the first supersonic jet in like you know whatever 56 years so it’s this insane jump on LinkedIn and that’s kind of going viral right now got me curious because I remember back in the day this was 2016 did you see the deal I I wasn’t it didn’t it’s not like somebody sent it to me to invest I could have if I chased it down and then actually several times since then I could have invested but I didn’t um maybe not too late maybe now’s the time but I remember watching demo day do you remember this story do you remember his demo day pitch at ycy demo day I didn’t know he went through YC I didn’t pay that close attention to it so he went through y combinator exactly went through white combinator now I remember at the time it stood out now YC does a lot more like moonshot type of companies back then it was all apps it was all software you’re making an iPhone app you’re making like a B2B SAS tool and this is 16 16 and there was this one guy there who was like we’re creating supersonic air travel uh you’re going to be able to fly from New York to London in three and a half hours that’s what we’re doing remember the Concord we’re going to do that again and um he gets on stage and I remember thinking while he’s pitching I’m like how is he going to have traction because every YC pitch ends the same where they show their user growth we’re growing 30% week over week but it’s like going from like you know 3 to 6 to 9 right like it’s like they have some crazy growth rate but it’s on a small customer base but that’s always the pitch so I remember wondering what’s this guy going to do and at the very end of his pitch he whips out a piece of paper and he goes and as of last night we have five billion in pre-orders thanks to Virgin thanks to Richard Branson and virgin and we were like what 5 billion and it was like an L he had an Loi it wasn’t actually a purchase order which basically just says uh one day if you can actually build a safe supersonic jet we will definitely buy it we will maybe buy it is what it means right like when somebody invites me to like a party I don’t want to go to I’m going to start sending Lois because an Loi just means I’m generally interested but I’m probably not going to do it right but still it was impressive five billion still to this day nobody’s walked into YC demo day with5 billion dollar worth of letters letter of intet so okay I remember seeing that then he disappeared for a while then he actually had to go do the work all right so imagine Landing a call with Richard Branson from a cold email one founder one of our listeners they did that and the HubSpot for startups team just launched a Playbook sharing exactly how it was done and not only that but also a killer report on fundraising for Founders so you could steal Ava’s cold email Playbook you can get the insight into what investors want and the top Tech stack across Founders and so much more I can’t stress this enough how crucial this is if you’re looking to get into networking and to raise money right now now get the link in the description below now back to the show so let me tell you this guy’s story because right now in Silicon Valley there is a buzzword actually I would say it’s kind of like an early buzzword like I would be buying stock in this buzzword because it’s about to go mainstream and that word is high agency you’ve seen High agency floating around no but that is is high agency the new contrarian oh it is I mean it shits on cont contan dude where contrarian walked we have to sell democratize democrati is done that was my grandfather we have the short contrarian we’re going all in on high agency wait long high agency the man in the arena has that just plummeted had a moment had a moment uh but chamoff just butchered that one so that one’s done so all right so check this out so high agency is this word and there’s uh our buddy George Mack by the way is like all in on high agency like he I think he’s writing book High agency right now I he by the way he bought the domain high agency.com and I was like how’d you get that he goes the guy let it expire after 10 years and I sniped it right away I was like very low agency move High agency by him low agency by the other right the it’s like in football the low man wins no no in business the high agency man wins and so um the classic meme which we should put on the screen on YouTube is guy is the cartoon guy is trapped on an island and he has these like pieces of bark or wood or whatever and he he spells out help he’s waiting for someone to come save him that’s the low agency guy and the high agency guy takes the wood and makes a boat and rows away um right so that that’s like the the gist of this okay but this guy this dude from boom supersonic what’s his name Blake he is just absolutely dripping with agency all right so take this out he’s guy is soaked this guy is a yeah he’s a buffalo wing and he is tossed hand tossed hi all right so here we go story starts he drops out of high school his parents sent him to a good high school like a nice private school and he doesn’t feel like he fits in he doesn’t really look like uh get that interested in class he drops out and um so now he’s high school dropout Blake parents are kind of concerned he ends up finding something that he’s really into like science and math like he in this like after school program or there’s some [ ] like that but forget that first High agency move once he started getting interested in science math engineering he’s like actually I think I do like school I just didn’t know what I I just didn’t like my high school the way I was doing it but now I found I actually do like to learn I want to go to college well how do you go to college you don’t have a high school degree or a high school dropout he finds that at Carnegie melon they have a special program for high school dropouts who want to go to Carnegie melon so he applies it he applies as a junior and he writes an essay about why you have to write an essay why you didn’t finish high school and he writes High School had nothing left to teach me he gets in not only does he get in he gets the merit scholarship and he graduates with a know bachelor in computer science okay so what does he do next his next move is that he’s like I want to be an entrepreneur but I don’t know what idea I want to start yet so why don’t I go and work for who I think is the greatest entrepreneur right now and that was Jeff Bezos in 2001 so Amazon is out the do crash just happened Amazon’s stock is in the tank I that’s what I’m betting you’re looking that up right now 2001 it was I mean it was [ ] it was uh uh a dollar now it’s $273 great so he joins Amazon in 2001 and his goal is to learn as much as he can from basa so he’s like all right I got to build something that’s of interest to basos and at the time Bezos had an idea which was like hey we need to we need Amazon products to show up number one in Google search results so Blake builds this automated system where he is um buying Google ads for every single product on Amazon like the entire catalog he builds an auto bidder so that Amazon will bid not too much but bid enough to be the top result on Amazon which is one of the reasons by the way that like the you know there’s like stories of like there’s a story that a company wants you to know and then there’s a story that actually happened and I’ve read a lot about Amazon and one of the one of the make or break moments was the fact that they were one of Google’s biggest Spenders and they crushed it and knocked it out the park because Google was under and they were able to get big fast because people think all these companies are competitors they’re also co-conspirators right Google pays Apple buil tens of billions of dollars to be the default search engine Apple in uh Microsoft invested in apple when they were big competitors Bill Gates basically kind of Saved Apple at at a time when Steve Jobs needed investment and in this case Amazon is the biggest spender on Google like you know that oh what I thought these guys were competitors and Bezos was one of the Angel Investors of Google or something like that exactly so he builds this system by 24 now he’s 24 years old three years in and he was basically working under direct view of basos so he goes every three months I had to give Bezos a report on how we were doing and by the age of 24 he’s running a $300 million p&l in inside of Amazon he’s the he’s the GM of that business but even though he’s learned a bunch and he uh kind of you know cut his cut his teeth here he wanted to be an entrepreneur so he quits even though he’s like a rising star at Amazon and he knows Amazon is like a Amazon’s a winner right Amazon was a winner if he had done nothing else but just stay at Amazon get promoted as an exact keep getting stock options every year he would have made hundreds of millions of dollars essentially risk-free at that point yeah but he quits and him and some guy uh decide to create a start so they create a startup it kind of fails they create another startup eventually they sell that startup to Groupon and this is where the LinkedIn part of Groupon comes in is like this hilarious quote on on hisp on his group on LinkedIn description so he says what he does like you know senior whatever manager of this thing and then his description goes nothing like working on internet coupons to make you year for doing something that you truly love so he after two years at Groupon he quits and he decides you know what I want to do a company I don’t know what I want to do it in and his whole life he had been interested in Flight he talks about like when he was a kid he was always interested in model airplanes his parents took him to a museum he was always obsessed with flight one of his things on his bucket list was that you know in his 20s he wanted to go Mack 2 like he got his pilot’s license he always just was interested in flight but it was a hobby and he’s trying to think of what startup ideas to do and his method for figuring this out is I’m going to write a list of all the ideas starting with what would be the most awesome if I did it down from there and then I’ll just probably cross out the first five because they’re unrealistic or impractical and I’ll probably do number five on the list was his plan but number one was create a supersonic jet because like Elon um the way Elon started SpaceX you’ve heard the story where he went into it like it thinking this is not going to work well but even before that he s you know he sell uh PayPal sells Elan now has $180 million he leaves and he’s just curious like what okay what else and he’s curious um what’s the latest with NASA’s Mars mission like I haven’t heard about our Mars mission like are we is it in progress and I just missed it is it launching soon I can’t wait to go see it maybe I’ll fly there and go see it I want to see the launch I love rockets and goes on the NASA website and there’s no mention of Mars and he’s like what we went to the moon like in whatever 73 like how are we not where’s the next mission and it wasn’t even on the website and he’s like what and he got so upset by that that the start of SpaceX was actually that he was going to privately fund a mission to send like a plant to Mars and then it became like a turtle or jelly or something there was like you know some living some technically living thing and it was like I’m going to spend $25 million doing this was just like a stunt and uh just to kind of like reinvigorate the interest in this same way this guy Blake puts on a Google alert for supersonic jet he’s like I I just can’t wait till there’s a supersonic flight I’ll be the first guy to buy it and he’s waiting and he’s waiting he’s like is nobody working on this and he’s like oh it must be that it just doesn’t the numbers don’t the math ain’t math it like that’s got to be the problem so he creates a spreadsheet and in it he writes down the assumptions he’s like basically like the engineering assumptions and he gives himself like a few months to work on this where he’s like all right let me just dig into this so I think it was two weeks where he does like he goes and buys a book cuz he’s like I I don’t know anything about how airplanes fly but he goes and buys a book and he creates an Excel spreadsheet on one tab was the cost model he’s like is it an economic problem because the the brief history is is we had this thing called the Concord back in the day have you ever seen the Concord like a have you ever looked at photos of it it looked great photos yeah slick and it was like inspiring and everybody loved it and it was the same idea you could get from you know here to London New York to London in three and a half hours is yeah it was like three and a half hours or 3 hours and 45 minutes was the fastest time ever which double the speed so it’s 8 hours normal flight so it was twice you could fly twice as fast and the idea was the Concord was like this luxury item in a way it was priced really expensive so this is you know almost 50 years ago that it was invented but you know it was priced at like $155,000 a ticket and if you look at the inside of it the photos I think it was only like three seats by three so it was like a it was like two or three seats 80 something passengers I think yeah so there it wasn’t a lot of people at all so it when do you think about it’s hard to make a lot of money high price low volume not a lot of routes only limited number of routes uh but it had all these problems like if you go look up like the problems with the Concord right like it was like yes it was expensive it also like got really hot like there’s this famous thing where when they first launched it to do like a PR Blitz or like to sponsor it they had Pepsi sponsor the conquer and so they painted it light blue and the before that was a this white reflective material to reflect heat uh to not store heat but the light blue thing made it where it got so hot inside the cabin that you know the hour flight they could only do for 20 minutes cuz it was like cooking everything inside so like heat was a problem noise was a problem price was the problem um you know duration was a problem I also think there was a really famous crash too where it was like that was the and I don’t remember if I don’t you know this was years I was a kid or I don’t even think I was alive actually but I remember reading about it and the what I read was the reality is that it could have worked or it could have been great but the perception was that this thing is dangerous and it’s too radical and it crashed I’m never getting on that is that right exactly so the the last the thing that kind of killed the Conqueror was they had this flight where during takeoff the tire hit something on the runway and it ruptured the tire and then the plane basically exploded and killed everybody on board and that was like all right we’re done with this thing too dangerous so it had safety problems price problems heat problems um you know like noise problems because it would like you know shatter Windows when it would do it Sonic Boom so it was like whatever so I think in like 2003 was the last flight so in about 20 years there’s been no no no flight sense nobody was even working on it so he he has this spreadsheet and he’s like look am I just nuts because the way I’m penciling this out you know we only need like a 30% Improvement in like fuel efficiency a 30% Improvement in this one other thing and he’s like dude it’s been 50 years like our TVs got better our phones got better our computers got like dramatically better not 30% better they got like 3,000% better he’s like I’m pretty sure we could make the plane 30% more efficient and then this would work so he goes to this like you can buy a t you I can get a TCL 75 in TV for literally $600 and it’s delivered to my door the next day exactly if I can do that we can make a we can make a chat so he goes to the Stanford professor and he’s like he’s like hey like you know this we need a 30% I my calculations show we need a 30% fuel efficiency and by the way that conquer was designed at a time where like they use slide rulers and like you know wind tunnels to test things like I think we could do this and the professor was like yeah I think you can uh the math is correct he’s like so you know you might have engineering problems but like the physics are fine and so he gets encouraged he’s like I just thought I must not know something and that’s why this hasn’t been done but it’s one of these classic things where like The Beginner’s mind goes in and they don’t see the problems and therefore they do it whereas all the experts just assume that’s we tried that it doesn’t work and so he goes and he he decides to create an airplane company okay so what’s the next move how’s he going to fund this thing now’s he going to build it because again this dude just bought a textbook about flight he doesn’t know anything about this stuff so he’s like all right I need to recruit a great team and we got a we need some money so he decides he takes half of all of his life savings and decides to fund the company bank account with it and he hires up something like 6 to 10 people one of which he poaches the former chief engineer of Gulf Stream and he’s like I thought it would be hard to get talent because here I am I’m this [ ] Groupon kid saying I’m going to build a you know a supersonic jet it’s never been hasn’t been done in you know 50 years like the last American new American Airlines company that worked was like you know 80 years ago or something so the business plan is a little crazy it’s probably going to you know it I think it cost the conquer like a billion dollars to make the conquered like it was like a billion dollar project they thought it was 20 million and they ended up spending a billion he’s like I think we I think we’ll need 200 million but I don’t know where I’m going to get all that so let me just start by funding it myself did you did he say how much he hasn’t said the the amount but he at one point he’s like I realized like I’m playing chicken with my own bank account here he’s like I want to go raise money he ends up raising like a million bucks still almost nothing but he gets like a few early Believers in I one of my really close friends Chris was in that round oh wow did he say what he saw or why he’s been telling me about it for years and that’s originally how I heard about this and he was like this guy’s just magical and I I I just couldn’t get I’m like a Silicon Valley software person starting a jet company that just that’s really dumb which is evidenced by dumb ideas being potentially amazing and how that’s actually quite common and by the way the airline airplane Market is super fragmented oh wait no it’s not there’s two companies one owns 51% the other one owns 49% it’s just Aus and Boeing that’s the whole market right so you know he’s trying to go to basically break up this duopoly in in theory okay so let’s go back to the to so he hires this guy so he hires a team and he’s like actually one of the the surprising things was it was way easier to hire great talent because the bigger the mission the better the pitch so he’s like I have had a super exciting Mission I didn’t have a lot of other things I didn’t have a lot of traction I didn’t have a lot of funding but I had a great Mission I had an exciting project that was basically like nerd porn so he’s like any nerdy you know engineer who worked on airplanes you could either go work at Boeing or Airbus and your job is to like you know make sure that the cabin temperature goes down by two degrees so that we could sell more you know VOD konics like that was they weren’t trying to innovate at all so if you were somebody who wanted to innovate this was like the only option so he recruits your R team then he goes in into YC and he was skeptical he goes into YC combinator he’s like isn’t it just for software companies but Sam alman’s like no no no we like heart heart stuff um Sam’s like I don’t know if you’re you’re going to get in but you should go talk to these four other guys who had Hardware companies that kind of failed in YC but they’ll tell you that like they would have failed much worse had they not had YC so he go talk them they’re like yeah it was great let’s do it so he joins and he’s like I realized something pretty quickly he goes YC is architected in this three-month program on demo day three months you’re going to stand on stage in front of all the investors you’re going to make your pitch you got to raise money that’s the whole point and so he’s like what the hell am I going to do in 3 months so he goes I realized that during YC if I went to them and I was like hey we reduced the drag coefficient by 30% and this engine design is really awesome and like that’s our progress update we’re cooked and so he’s like I got to figure out something that I’m going to do so he comes up with two plans he’s like the number one I got to sell the dream so he spends a good chunk of his time and money just building like a model airplane that looks sick he’s like all right this is not going to actually help us make the plane but uh it’s going to help people see that we’re making a plane and it’s going to look awesome how much does YC give you like 125 Grand yeah something like at the time probably just spent all like $100,000 hiring some firm making like a really great model so he had like a model like he had like a model but then he also had a like a a gnarly looking engine and he’s like we just want to stand there with a big ass engine and then people walk by be like whoa is that a jet engine he’s like yeah that’s the jet engine we’re going to use on our supersonic jet would you like to hear more so he’s like I need that I candy he needed a booth babe and for him the booth babe was the model and the engine so smart right because like one of the commonalities Elon and these other guys is it’s you can’t just be an engineer in your in your little engineering hole you got to know just enough about the rest about the marketing the capital raising all the other things to to survive so he did the second thing was he was like I need these like purchase orders so he makes a list and he’s like all right how can I go get Lois and he’s like he makes this list and so he’s like uh here’s his quote he goes I realized I couldn’t show up to demo day with no sales otherwise my Goose was pretty cooked so I looked at my sales Pipeline and it was United Delta Lanza Air China and we only had eight or nine weeks before demo day and I thought to myself there’s no way I’m closing withan leanza Airlines by demo day it’s not going to happen I’ll be lucky if I close them in 9 years let alone 9 weeks so I realized I actually only had two options a startup air or virgin he goes so we I went all in and focused all of my ER my sales efforts on startups and virgin he goes I went to the startups who are currently operating and I got one of them to do an Loi but it was a company you’ve never heard of but it was the best I could do and her I was 24 hours before demo day and the lucky break we got was that demo day was split into two days if it was demo day one he would have stood on age and said we have a small Loi from this company you’ve never heard of luckily we got randomly assigned to demo day 2 so he had bought an extra 24 hours in that extra 24 hours he ends up getting an email from Virgin the night before demo day that says you’re allowed to announce we’ll take the first 10 planes we’ve got options on them and through Virgin Galactic will even help you build it it goes I fell off my chair I almost screamed I had to read the things three times I couldn’t believe it we went from have we went from being the biggest laughing stock on demo day to the company that showed up with5 Billion worth of an Loi worth of Lois a record that won’t be broken soon dude that’s so sick wa what is this what year is this 2016 so yeah I was reading um I I was looking up my email to try to figure out did I ever talk to this person how do I know him and the earliest thing I could only find was I think in 2020 it says uh the hustle actually wrote about him said United Airline wants to buy 15 supersonic airliners from boom sonic so it took him an additional two years to get the United Airlines the next so okay so then how did he get Branson High agency baby I told you he’s dripping an agency all right so what does he do so he’s like all right if I want to get Richard Branson I got to go through somebody I trust he goes I’m also not just going to try one path to Branson we got to try multiple paths to Branson so he’s like if I get blocked over here I got this other long shot going so he’s like I had this guy on our board who was an astronaut this guy Mark Kelly you probably heard of him so that guy was on his Advisory Board he’s like he knows Branson he’s like so I’m thinking all right we got we got to find a way to to get to Richard and so he goes um we asked we asked Mark what’s the best way to get to Richard Branson how do we make that happen he and he told me goes hey you you can’t get him interested in you but go where he’s interested in his own thing so what do you mean he goes Virgin Galactic has this big roll out for their spaceship Richard’s got to be there so you just got to get there go where he is and they’re like okay and so they get in he’s like could you make could you email him and say hey these guys I’m advising from boom supersonic are going to be in Mojave when you’re doing your roll out you should meet with them when you’re there and then he’s like um and then he reaches out to the Virgin guys and he’s like hey we’re going to be in town uh to see Richard can we come to the roll out and like you know so basically they get invited to the roll out they get there he’s super busy they end up getting 15 minutes with him when he’s at brunch with his mom and they go up to him and they go he goes um uh Richard they show them what they’re doing they like we’re building the first Super Sonic Jets since the Concord we fixed these problems uh we’re making that happen and he goes look we’re not asking you for your money all we want to know is this when this thing flies do you want a virgin logo on it and he go I think that was the key you got to ask for the right thing when you do a deal you it’s probably going to be hard to close you got to ask for what’s really going to help you so we told Richard look if you’re our customer we will get money elsewhere we don’t need money from you and that was crucial uh basically like the first few babies of these that are in the air do you want them with a virgin logo or not and so that was the thing that got Richard Branson across the line was making the intelligent ass and hustling their way this is a movie this is a movie if it works if it ends well it’s a movie well they just did their flight so they just did their first demo flight where but it wasn’t a uh I think what the test was if I remember correctly was it the engine that they were testing they got the engine cuz the plane is like a it’s a small plane right this was a smaller plane than the real plane that they’re going to have and I don’t think it was the full speed that they’re going to have but they did achieve I believe they achieved Super Sonic flight you could check me on that but I they they achieved the right they crossed the threshold they did it safe they landed it and is they like whatever xb1 or whatever they’re calling that thing okay he’s got some great startup advice so here’s here’s the way he described his startup I like the way he phrased this so he goes here’s my advice for startups um pick something that’s going to be worth it to you personally that is what’s that is how you stack the deck in your favor stack to the deck so that you will be motivated and when you look at what you’re creating versus if you went to Google or Facebook or Amazon it should be a no contest um if you haven’t found that just don’t even start a startup I did that my first time I just started a startup just for just because and it was a horrible idea you you should start a startup when you’re like I must make this happen and um something I’ve come to believe is that the bigger the idea the easier it becomes because it motivates you and the people around you and your track better people to come work on it when we were brainstorming this most of the ideas we came up with were like no one’s going to really appreciate this blah blah blah blah but for us it was like the most exciting thing we could ever do and so that’s all that mattered was like you know stacking the deck in your favor doing it as a must rather than a we could do this um and so that that I thought one really great takeaway I was reading this quote by the guy I don’t know how to say his last name but the guy who wrote Crime in punishment you know like this famous novel and he said um your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing and I was reading I I just read that like an hour ago and it’s sat with me and what you’ve described is exactly that yeah I love this guy uh so I don’t know him but I’m rooting for them I want to invest now cuz you know why not let’s let’s get on the team this and there’s been a lot of I think there’s been well there definitely has been but there’s been I think he’s wrote publicly about a lot of the downsides of all this which is that it’s this has not been clear I think he had to take a huge down round and he tweeted out about it I believe and I think his most recent valuation was $2 billion um which was down from the other amount but didn’t he tweet about the down round and how like they basically almost ran out of money and how it’s almost failed a bunch of different times I don’t know I didn’t see that I also I’m different than you I feel like you love to know the downsides of things like even when a guest comes on that’s one of the questions you tend to ask which is interesting to me because I never really think about it but you’re always like what are the honest like it’s not all peaches and cream like what what are the downsides of your approach which is obviously an intelligent question but I think there’s something good about being delusional about it too and just be like I have a convenient hole in my memory and in my brain to not even really pay attention or remember those things the reason I ask that is because I have been a victim of this many times where I go and say well this guy did it why can’t I do it and then I start doing it and I think to myself this is way harder than it than it than it looked why is this so hard and and so I always look for those I always ask those questions not to say that someone shouldn’t do something but just to say that it is much more challenging than it appears and that is okay and normal because I remember thinking on my journey this sucks you know this person he never felt that way why do I feel that way like I’m I’m full of [ ] what the hell I’m not I’m not good enough and then I want to like be reminded that like this is a normal feeling this is a normal problem I’m having you got to keep going that’s why I asked those questions uh yeah to I think it’s totally helpful to have that the one that helps me is um Tony Robins does his thing he talks about dabblers versus stressor Achievers versus Masters and I’ve talked about this I won’t do the whole thing but like one of the things he says at the end is that anybody who’s pursuing anything no matter what if you are in it you’re going to hit plateaus so forget even downs but like just plateaus where it feels like it’s not working the progress is not happening it’s not happening as fast as you want it’s not growing it’s not working everyone’s saying no we don’t have that investor whatever it is right and the one thing that Tony said that just always stuck in my mind almost like as a it’s like a it’s like a a jingle in a song or like a commercial where he goes when that Plateau comes the dabbler quits the stressor stresses and the master says Ah I thought I’d be seeing you soon hello my old friend you’re here I I was expecting you which is like we have this one company we started uh just a little over a year ago that’s just been like up and to the right like this company is I haven’t announced it yet but it’s like almost a $10 million run rate already profitable bootstrapped in one year it’s like insanely insanely successful but we just hit like our you know our first plateau and I feel like when we called it out it was almost like this kind of like embarrassing down feeling of like oh man like we didn’t have ridiculous growth this month and we’re out where was I was like dude I’ve been expecting you where is the plateau I I know it’s coming I almost don’t even trust that it’s happening until that this is real until we start to face some of these and so yeah that’s why I ask those questions is I don’t want us as a media or whatever we are to be the ones who who I I want to be realistic the biggest business influencers on iTunes well yeah as spotify’s 13th biggest business influencer I just want to say that it is a [ ] pain in the ass and it’s still worth it do you know what I mean yeah yeah yeah you’re right speaking of insane agency speaking of insane down on the way to a huge up Have you listened to this episode I did with Nick M it came out this morning and I hadn’t listened to it yet but I went and like saw I saw it pop up this morning and I went and Googled his company and I own a ton of the toys that he makes like like not my kid me so like he owns uh he owns Mini Brands you bathe with the rubber fish well I’ve we have a r fish actually for my daughter does but you know I told you about mini toys right uh and how like I is mini Brands he owns Mini Brands and so like my wife is [ ] weird and when she was pregnant and like not feeling well I would go and surprise her by buying these mini toys which is the stupidest thing ever it’s just like a miniature it’s a ball full of miniature things like a miniature can of Coke a miniature Kit Kat a miniature notebook the weirdest [ ] and people love it and the other loves this dude I don’t know why my wife like loves 32-year-old loves those huh dude you know what I did was I I went and bought like literally $300 worth and I hid them in my drawer and whenever like she had a bad pregnancy day when she was like up uh sick or something I would go and get one and be like I got something for you it was like I was like you know I had like a secret stash and then also he makes these electric water guns that I went and bought uh last summer that I would shoot at my daughter like messing around have you seen the electric water guns do I think it’s hilarious how into the toys you are right now uh could I tell you the biggest oh holy [ ] moment from the whole thing well you got to tell the background it’s from what I know it’s two brothers in New Zealand that have a to company that does like three or four or five more than that more than that so let’s just let me start with this we have interviewed I don’t know how many 200 guests on this podcast 250 maybe hundreds billionaires millionaires Young Old Man Woman whatever criminals not criminals criminals non-criminals guys you don’t want to hang out with guys that you don’t want to hang out with right there’s a lot of people we we’ve had on this podcast he is at the top of the mountain number one is my number one most impressive entrepreneur of all of them I was blown away he is the he has the scrappiest hustle story and like the like his bottom was like the bond literally living on a dollar a day for years literally this is how funny this guy is so he okay so now I’ll zoom out now I’ll give you the context that you wanted but like I just needed to say that that out of every guest I’ve ever had on this podcast ever he is the number one most impressive founder that I’ve ever had on the podcast okay and we’ve had some cool people uh no offense everybody else all right so um but sort of story yeah but know your place um with all due respect you [ ] suck okay Robins I found Batman um this guy I say he’s the wealthiest man in New Zealand he’s got a company that him and his brother started family-owned bootstrap self-made billionaire they do a few billion dollars a year in Revenue they do a billion dollars a year in just profit I like that and they’ve been doing that um they never had outside investors he has dominated the toy industry so he built the most profitable toy company in the world he then built the fastest growing diaper company in the world you ever heard of Rascals diapers or million moon at Target so he’s got the fastest growing diaper company in the world doing hundreds of millions and by the way he made that while he was on sick leave he got his intestine removed cuz he got Crohn’s disease and while he was on his sick bed laying there he’s like oh I guess I’ll just dominate diapers now like he didn’t say need a diaper that’s what happened so he he creates the fast growing diaper company creates the fastest growing hair care company on Tik Tok now wait what he’s Monday hair hair care or whatever he owns Monday um not only all that he now is building the largest Factory in the world bigger than the Tesla Factory bigger than all that where robots are going to build houses autonomously and that’s what he’s doing he’s building houses with robots now um self funding the whole thing by the way problem I I asked I was like is that just got to be hundreds of millions of dollars of self funding and he just laughed um so so take that for what it’s worth let me now tell you okay so that’s that’s what the guy does can I tell you some of the just holy [ ] stories from this thing yeah all right so the dude’s 18 years old and he like after selling door Todo in New Zealand where they live trying to sell his brother like invented this hot air balloon toy at a science fair and his brother his older brother and put him to work and was like yo you need to go sell this door to door um the dude the day they’re like you know what we need a factory and they’re like oh all the manufacturing is in China so they moved to China but the hilarious thing is at 19 at 18 I think 18 19 something like that he they go to China that’s the story where they sleep in the bush outside the airport cuz the airport lights were too bright so they leave the airport sleep in a bush get bit by mosquitoes they have no money so they’re like they’re just on their own so he I was like oh so you found a manufacturer in China that you scaled up he goes what have you found a manufacturer we went to China and then built a factory on the side of a river like we just went with like wood and like a hammer and we built a factory and I was like what was the point of going to China you know you go to China to their factories are already there he’s like yeah we didn’t understand that like we we just went there and we just built our own Factory on the side of a river and we found this like Mom to make us food for two R&B a day 30 cents a day and then she had some people that could come work in the factory and then we just had we had our own production line and it sounds like a it sounds like a shed yeah they literally built a shed and then they just kept scaling up the shed and he’s like my brother didn’t come back home for like eight or nine years he just slept on the floor of the factory and I I slept on the floor too then except for when I had to go sell all right so how did they whn he’s like and our product sucked by the way this is one of my favorite things is like everybody who makes it they’re like the key is just to have a great product and and then if you’re a Founder you’re like dude what like okay I’ve made a great product now what nothing’s happening um and you know they don’t like people tend to leave out the like the manual work it took the lucky breaks it took to like get get the thing to start working what product it was a hot it was like a plastic hot air balloon toy or what um even worse so starts with a hot air balloon quickly re he’s like did again we didn’t know anything about anything so we go we build a shed by the river in China we’re making our hot air balloons then we’ve learned you can’t even export a hot air balloon he’s like literally it’s a fire in a tiny can like we can’t sell that so he’s like we realized that was a waste so we got to come up with a new toy and again everybody everybody tries to say we’re so Innovative so we innovated Innovation is great and then we made a great product he is the opposite he’s like so we found that this other toy was selling so we copied it uh we ruthlessly copied that toy and we made a shitty version of it cuz we didn’t know anything about manufacturing dude so this like white guy moved to China in out Chinese the Chinese exactly exactly he was like dude we lived on a dollar day I was like so you I was like I heard the story you at McDonald’s every day and he’s like every day that I wish McDonald’s was our Christmas treat we would go to McDonald’s and he’s like I for years I just remember saying like merry Christmas bro he’s like merry Christmas bro we would cheers our fries he’s like I used to eat half the fries and take it back and be like hey there’s only half the fries in here you guys DP me and get like a second serving of fries and he’s like that was the treat dud I used to do that all the time at bars I would order an iced tea and be like you made the Long Island Iced Tea wrong you forgot the liquor and by the way he was not saying Pride he was like I I was almost like a therapist because this guy’s never done a podcast by the way this was the first podcast I think he’s ever done and there’s no stories you can find of this guy like I went to do the research there’s no like oh him you know normally we do research you you go watch the three most watched podcasts that they’ve done and you pick up a bu of stuff he has zero he had to download Google Chrome to do the interview he’s like it’s not letting me do this every we’re like what and we’re like just open Chrome he’s like what’s Chrome and I was like you’re a billionaire you don’t know what Google what are you you he’s like oh I think I have Chrome hold on he’s like oh I got Chrome okay got it got it let me switch to my laptop this is going to work okay like just to get [ ] with you no he was that serious and so uh I was like dude why don’t you do any podcast I tell your story he’s like I don’t know I just never did what motivates this guy he’s just a maniac dude he uh he’s like is he was he was he calm was he calm very calm I felt like it was almost like a therapy session cuz I’m asking him about these times back in the day and he’s almost like yeah I don’t know what we were doing and why we were thinking like he just doesn’t think about and he was like not he’s like yeah we you know we we were super Scrappy but he’s like we were also a little mentally ill like we just were he goes we were so naive that naive is not even the right word so he’s like for example we got sued for millions of dollars because again we like copied someone’s toy and so it’s like a $2 million lawsuit it’s either going to bankrupt the company cuz we don’t have $2 million or we have to fight it but the lawyer that we talked to were like it’s going to cost you a million dollars to fight this he’s like dude we had like a few thousand he’s like so I go to Colorado and I find this lawyer he’s like this guy eventually got disbarred but I find this guy Chad and I tell him hey I’m going to do all the legal work you put your name on this and we’re GNA fight this this way and I paid him $50 to put his name on it and I did the all the lawsuit stuff myself just like Googling and we fought the lawsuit that way and then Chad got disbarred like later for other reasons what he told a story of he’s like dude we got this we got this he goes I used to I was like so how did you sell the thing like how did you sell these toys you send the products up and you were copying somebody else so why would anybody buy this he goes I emailed because I made a list of every retail buyer of every store in every region of the world and I emailed her called them every single day he remembered the name of every buyer this is from like 15 years ago cuz he would call or email them every day he goes the Walmart buyer he’s like I would call her or email her every day he’s like I never forget her and he’s like one day she emailed me being like Nick I do not need your daily email about your product and he goes well listen Jen I’m sorry it’s just a great product and I just had to tell you about it because we’ve really got some exciting things to the PIP it’s like I just didn’t let up finally he goes she just sent me the two most beautiful words in the in the English language send sample he’s like we’re in and he gets this like Walmart order and by the way actually before that uh somebody’s like hey do you have your showroom in Hong Kong I’ll send one of my buyers he goes of course of course showroom in Hong Kong yeah yeah we got one of those it’s like what’s a showroom in Hong Kong so he goes to Hong Kong he rents this little cubicle where they put like escorts in you know it’s like the red light district and like it’s enough for one human body and he just sleeps in there because he doesn’t have enough money for a hotel sleeps in there and then when a buyer shows up he just pops out he’s like hey it’s me whatever you would like to see our showroom and they’re like yeah we what is what is this this is a dressing room for like one person to change clothes in he’s like yeah yeah toys are inside here you go and he ends up getting this order from Walmart for uh 2 million units and he’s like oh my God that’s $30 million he’s like this is amazing at that time the revenue was like 150k a year and stre tells this story about how he’s like first he’s like I go and he goes I learned two words of Chinese too slow and go faster because our Factory our little old factory by the river had never produced 2 million units of anything and he’s like so we had to produce 2 million units of this thing I come home I take over the factory because I’m just like my brother’s like not working fast enough and then he’s like and then Walmart basically cancels the order after he’s like super deep in it and he like took a loan from the like from a contract manufacturer to like help him build the 2 million units and then he like goes and harasses the Walmart buyer to like hold up to the end of the bargain uh and he’s like by the way product doesn’t sell not a single one he’s like it’s retails at $30 discount to 25 discount to 20 discount to 15 he goes it ends end up selling for 50 cents he’s like he’s like it was like concrete on the Shelf how’ you find this guy I don’t know I I read something I I I must have heard something or read something CU about a few years ago we talked about him on the podcast and then yeah I remember that like three years ago Ben has emailed him no joke he showed me 17 times over the next 18 months um to get him to come on the podcast dude theidea this guy sounds awesome I need to go and watch this got to listen to this episode not like you know he’s not like Mr like super Storyteller Mr Suave or he’s a I mean he’s a great guy but like he just tells it like it is but if you listen to this thing I don’t know how long it is like 90 minutes or something like that I mean it is one of the most incredible entrepreneurial stories I’ve ever heard by the way all right so I I let me tell you a story now because we this is Chinese related but we’re just telling stories about interesting people I got to tell you about someone I just read about have you ever have you even been to New York have you ever been to York like Manhattan yes I am yeah okay when you were here did you see these crazy guys on electric they’re like they’re called electric bikes but they’re basically motorcycles they’re like the Uber Eats and door Dash drivers no I don’t think that was happening then dude so in New York like four years ago it just popped up that all of these Uber so there’s 70,000 Uber Eats and door Dash people in New York City in like the Manhattan and Brooklyn area it’s like and they’re all riding these electric bikes that fly they look like they’re normal bicycles but these things literally go 60 MPH and I ride my bike everywhere when I’m in New York City and like I’ve these [ ] have almost killed me tons of times and they’re and they’re dangerous they’re really dangerous and what you’ll notice is that they all have like these gloves on their bikes have you ever seen these like door Dash drivers in the winter I’ve seen that well they keep them there in the win in the summertime too and the reason they do that is because underneath those gloves they have like a motorcycle style acceleration like a twisty thing on the grip which is illegal you can’t have that because that like you know at what point are you go from being a bicycle to being a motorcycle where you there has to be rules and so there’s there was this weird thing where I’d be walking around and I’m like I even would ask these guys what is this bike and they don’t speak English so like like they couldn’t tell me but I was like I want to know what this bike is that goes 60 M an hour and has like a twisty throttle thing because this is sick I want one and so I started doing research around it and I think I talked about it in the podcast I couldn’t find out what it was well two or 3 days ago an article came out and it told the story about what this thing was and it’s pretty ridiculous and so basically there’s a guy who comes from China he’s got a too hard of a name to pronounce but his American name is Andy he comes in 2011 and when he comes he uh basically admits that he goes I paid a guy 45 Grand and he smuggled Me In from Mexico I came illegally and then in this article they even linked to a rap video that he did when he was broke and poor and he was like I decided to come to America to make it rich that was like the Chinese lyrics of this video Well turns out the first thing that he did was he noticed that there was all these Uber Eats like bike riders and they get punished if they don’t bring or if they don’t show up in time like if you don’t deliver quickly you get like docked like you don’t get the full rate and so he starts importing he I think he borrowed 12 Grand from someone and he starts importing these electric bikes from China and he opens up a shop and one of these shops was right by my house right to stay in Brooklyn years ago and i’ would always see these guys like like they would kind of hang out outside the shop well what I didn’t realize was that he scaled this thing so fast to where he started having um like literally 30 different stores all around Manhattan to where he’s selling these things it’s called fly ebikes he’s selling these ebikes that go like 40 50 m an hour and they’re only $1,000 it’s incredible and they’re incredibly illegal like uh like they they literally just don’t follow any of the law but if you look at the under there’s like a when you order these bikes there’s like says something in the plate it says like there’s literally like a metal plate and it says like you know this uh meets this USA standard this and that and like in the article someone was like nobody checks that it’s just basically an honor System and that we hope that you do it but there’s no one actually checking these things but the guy ends up Andy selling 70,000 bikes in four years and a few months ago uh I think it was in September he had the audacity to take the company public and so it go it goes public on the NASDAQ and it’s uh I think the ticker is f l y and you can see the ticker uh I think that uh the and you can see I put all their financials in this document but the year before they went public they were doing like 30 million in revenue and like2 or3 million in profit but they’re getting sued like crazy because one of their bikes catch on fire cuz they follow no rules he basically admit that he’s like yeah we’re Cowboys we uh build first and we ask questions later and so like homes have built down people have actually died from the batteries being B uh catching on fire in someone’s apartment and burning the [ ] apartment down and they’re getting sued and one of the lawyers suing them he’s got this quote where he’s like dude six years ago these guys were bus boys serving dishes or cleaning dishes in restaurants now they’re running a publicly traded company they know nothing about building bikes they’re just like getting the cheapest [ ] they can over here and it’s all true by the way they’re insane but I cannot believe they went public and in like the the one of the I went and watch listen to this I I listen to one of their um their reports or like when they were inter like investors were interviewing the CEO Andy before he took it public and they’re like why’ you go decide to take it public and he says he was inspired by the movie Wolf of Wall Street and that’s why he decided to take the company public he says that in a YouTube video in a YouTube video he says I decided to take it public because I saw Wolf of Wall Street and so now because of all these lawsuits and because the company is just like [ ] like it’s just like they’re breaking so many laws they just do whatever the hell they want the the stock has crashed we need a spin-off pod of just absolutely Renegade Chinese Founders just doing doing things that that we would never dream of I would subscribe to that instantaneously well he’s like the real life jinyang from uh Silicon Valley where like he’s just sitting there smoking cigar sigs and like someone’s like you know you really need safety stuff and he’s like who says like you know what I mean like like the Deep founder right right now the Deep seek founder is going to get lot of Pub for this same reason it’s just this guy’s hilarious but it is actually inspiring that like all these dorks are like we got to do this we got to we got to like have this process we got to do this and meanwhile you got this guy Nick moving to China and not knowing [ ] and then we got this Chinese guy moving to New York yor and not knowing [ ] and like it’s and it still works and his company by the way he started a electric bike company it does 30 million in revenue and 3 million in income so like it’s not nothing uh so and he started with $112,000 uh pretty badass though besides the fact that it’s um you know like incredibly illegal and dangerous and people are dying but besides that it’s like kind of an interesting story because I’ve always wondered where these freaking bikes have come from I got to give a shout out to curb they have um an article and it’s called the moped King how an ex delivery worker upended the streets of New York City for better and For Worse um and it’s called fly EB ebike yeah yeah yeah I just need the spin-off somebody needs to make the uh not not the right way to do it but still impressive a version of my million uh yeah we went from like we went from like um inspiring who cares about money we’re going to like make travel better to um hardcore shark does whatever it takes but still ethical but like I’m gonna get rich and just conquer the world to uh [ __ ] everyone get paid the full Journey exactly yeah all right that’s it that’s the Pod is that it that’s it that’s the Pod all right for