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 think you should go hard on this i so you have a hundred thousand listeners a month you’re making single-digit thousands of dollars you would make like six figures a year for sure doing this [Music] um all right good so sean what’s good what’s going on what’s up what’s up you got ben still on the line what do you what do you got for ben normally you’re like so heat turn off your video we need to focus i’m going to tell you why so ben made a comment to me maybe to you too i think you were here like a while ago a month or two months ago and i’ve been thinking a lot about it and he kind of made it not a big deal but it’s kind of a big deal to me so uh ben i’m not i’m not gonna i’m i’m gonna only i haven’t told you i’m gonna bring up this bring this up i’m only gonna like kind of mention the thing and then you could you could kind of explain how you want to but basically ben wilson has this podcast called how to take over the world and you said that a very wealthy person like a hundreds of millions of dollars person has you on retainer and basically tells you the strategy that this person’s going to do in business and you tell him stories from history to let him know what you predict will happen is that right what yes yes he made is that crazy he didn’t explain it that way but that’s exactly what happened it’s like a sugar daddy but it’s like a history daddy like a history baby i guess sugar baby okay that’s true did i get that act did i explain that yeah so here’s the full story i get a lot of people who reach out to me at this point basically any fan who’s like hey can i talk to you for a little bit i’m just like yeah i’m not that big yet if you’re big enough that you want to if you i think i’m important enough that you wanna talk to me yeah i’ll talk to you that’s starting to change a little bit a lot of people want my time now but this was a while ago um and so i said yes i’ll talk to you he’s like i’m thinking of starting something out to talk to you about it i was like okay this guy’s probably a joker but whatever he reached out to me i’ll talk to him so we hop on a zoom and first thing like he’s got a glass wall behind him and you can tell he’s in like a very very very high high rise in new york city you can see the whole skyline behind him so immediately i was like this is not what i thought it was going to be and uh so he was like yeah i’m a managing director at xyz bank one of the biggest banks in the world um and i lead their x division very very big uh financial division at this big bank and he’s like i just randomly found your podcast and you don’t know this but i’ve been listening to you you’re my guru now so i want to talk to you about like what i’m thinking of starting and i just want to bounce it off you and see um what you think about it and so he gets to call me whenever he wants to and that sounds more normal sam was saying he specifically wants you to tell him based on history here’s what’s going to happen is that that’s when that’s what you you met you go you said you said that yeah like i said i explain it differently but that’s what’s going on here like he likes you and he wants you to like tell him like how would julius caesar handle this or how did julius caesar handle this tell me like what what to do that’s that’s basically the angle he’s going for yeah because he knows me from how to take over the world so yeah oh my god that is amazing isn’t that awesome well first of all hopefully me laughing about it doesn’t blow this for you uh but but wow okay but listen i want to ask you more questions about this man but i had the same reaction sean i was like what that sounds like a scam but i’ve been thinking a lot about this and i actually think that’s a great idea i think that that is a wonderful idea what do they say history may not repeat itself but it definitely rhymes if you’re gonna tell people what behaviors to avoid or like how other people have had the same move and what happened i think that’s great how much is he paying you zero what i think he’s paying you i thought you were like a retainer no no no no he’s paying me so he so he offered to pay me and i so much of the offer how much did he offer well he didn’t offer explicitly but he’s he said he said people he said people who do what you do who who consult people like me often make upwards of five thousand dollars an hour uh i don’t think you would pay me because i’ve never done it before i’m not like a high level coach but i was like well that’s a pay range i was not considering i must admit um but he said i will pay you but then uh i ended up telling him no don’t worry about it and uh i just think it’s better to have the connection and have him think that he owes me at this point okay that’s fine i but i actually think that there’s like is something interesting here like because like alex friedman or like these like thinker type folks like they definitely could get paid 5 or 10 grand an hour yeah but this to me is more like when you the way you described it it’s more like you know in billions or whatever it’s like the guy’s got a kink and he goes to like get dominated by some shaking a mask with a whip uh to me it’s more like that where it’s like some rich guy is just like hey uh i need you to when i call you i need you to tell me that i’m i’m a huge fuck-up and i suck and that’s gonna motivate me to go into this meeting and prove myself daily and i will pay you two thousand dollars an hour if you are a hot woman who tells me uh you know i suck and you spit on the webcam to me that’s that’s more where the opportunity is than like telling me about lessons from history no this is good because it’s like let’s say that um he’s like i’m working on this thing my opinion of it is this this and this and he and ben goes well you know rothschild he actually the reason why they did really well because they just got information just a little bit faster and they did this this and this business is so context dependent it’s not like you actually need the strategies of the roth house or julius caesar i don’t think i think it’s motivational to hear these stories right like i i use one story why does it matter if it’s motivational or if it’s like strategically well that’s actually accurate because you got to know what am i delivering right what am i actually selling this person am i selling them strategies from the 19 you know 1830s or am i selling them that hey you know for example ben i use this anecdote you have from from how to take over the world where you talked about um you know edison used to go edison used to be like he was amazing he was like had done so much by the age of 25 and he’s like um you know but nikola tesla had already done xyz by this age i’m so behind and even though he was the greatest inventor of our age he personally felt behind because he was comparing himself to someone and then he read that julius caesar used to go look at a statue of alexander the great and be like what the [ ] am i doing with my life alexander the great already ruled you know the world by now and to me that lesson was like you know that was actually a pretty important lesson a lot of people feel like they’re behind or feel like they they compare themselves to others who are doing better it’s like dude there’s no end to that julius caesar used to do that and feel that way so you know that’s a trap you know that there is no amount where you’ll stop feeling that way so might as well just let it all go but that’s kind of the same thing you’re just talking about life strategy i mean it’s kind of yeah i agree with you i’ll tell you how it actually went because because what you said sean actually plays into it that he said i’m thinking about starting this thing it’s a higher possible outcome but if i stay where i am right now it’s just a more steady like i can go from whatever i can go from 220 to 500 hopefully in the next 10 years um but i’m not gonna become a uh billionaire essentially um but if i go start my own thing i could lose a lot of money what does 220 mean 220 million oh that’s what he’s worth no i’m i am saying number i’m not going to tell you what he’s worth but he’s but it is in the hundreds of millions sounded pretty specific to me all right sounded like not a made-up number all right and so and so he was essentially like should i do this thing so i tell him i i talk about the i talked about the concept of exactly what you’re saying of like so much pressure on you to say something that’s not [ ] stupid i was literally as he was saying this i was like why the hell are you talking to me like it was so funny to me but he loved the podcast he thought i’d have something interesting to say so i was like literally just grasping in my head i’m panicking a little bit i’m like what am i gonna say to this guy and so i start talking before i even know what i’m gonna say i said uh okay well have you heard of loss aversion and i brought up the idea of loss of version which i’m sure you heard of that he hadn’t heard a lost version so i explained to him a little bit what loss of version was explain it for somebody who’s listening who doesn’t want to go so a loss aversion is the idea that um that you value not losing your money more than you value gaining money so you put more emphasis on it so i essentially said you need to make loss aversion work for you essentially if you believe that you’re going to be successful then um you need to visualize that success and say to yourself and realize every day that you delay starting your your new thing is going to make you billions you’re losing millions of dollars because you’re you’re failing to act and uh he was like that was amazing that’s changed my whole perspective he was he was blown away i think that you’re doing something that’s like so common which is and i do it too you uh sean does not do this you uh you you are putting too low value you’re playing yeah you’re not really how it ends though let me tell you how it ends so um it was like a month later i was in new york city so i said let’s meet up let’s get lunch we went to a really nice restaurant and he bought me lunch which was very nice and i was like so when are you starting the thing and he’s like well i’m not actually doing it and he like gave his reasons why he’s not he’s not starting it yet and i was like okay well it sounded good when it came out of my mouth but apparently my advice was not that valuable your spit is watered drink it exactly that’s when you need to go dominatrix dude it’s a yin and yang good cop bad cop sort of thing i think by the way i think that version thing i think the numbers are two to one meaning you you’d have to make two dollars for to feel the same as losing one you’d have to make two thousand to feel the same level of emotional hit as as losing 1000 would be i don’t know if that’s [ ] but i’ve read that that’s the ratio of like how much we value lost more than gain sean do you get asked to consult and like do this type of stuff i get asked i’d never consult anymore but uh i basically run a simple filter which is would i do this for free that doesn’t mean i’m gonna do it for free it’s would i do this for free so for ben and ben’s case ben’s like oh this sounds like a super interesting guy he did do it forever i’m gonna learn as much from this guys he’s gonna learn from me if not more so you know i’m happy to to do my do this with my time so that that’s one thing and then the second part is dude you get paid crazy money for doing this type of [ ] like uh sam you do these glg calls have you done any of these i i i used to i think i was getting paid a thousand dollars an hour yeah exactly i set my rate at the max that they let up let me do which is now two thousand thousand two thousand that’s what it was and um and dude i’ll get paid two thousand bucks to just do like a forty minute call with some re like first of all it’s kind of funny because they’re like it is this like weird underground dominatrix [ ] where it’s like i’m a hedgehog manager i can’t tell you the fun i can’t tell you what i’m looking at i can’t tell you my name but like it’s like a once it’s a one-way transaction it’s like i’m the masseuse and they’re laying face down i can’t see who they are and um and then they’re like okay say the word metaverse and i’m like metaverse tell me tell me who’s gonna who who’s which stock’s gonna go up because of the metaverse i’m like dude i don’t [ ] know and they’re like what and i’m like yeah but i could tell you you know here’s some things i i think well well whenever i do those things i talk really slow yeah because you just need an hour to pass yeah you i always talk really slow and i’ll be like wait hang on let me get my headphones the better way i can’t talk slow it’s like i’m too nervous like like i said with ben you feel a tremendous amount of pressure it doesn’t really matter how much money you have when somebody’s paying you something i would never pay someone two grand for a phone call even though i’m sure there’s an economic case where it makes sense it’s just a big number to me to just pay for somebody to talk to me uh i’m so i’m so i’m so not used to it that when i’m on the other side i’m getting paid i’m like i need to deliver this guy like some insane insight that they’ve and i put this weird pressure that just is unachievable but i’ll be like i’ll say my point and i really only have one point and i’ll be like another way of thinking about it is that i’ll repackage the same idea with like some metaphor or some analogy just to fill air space because like like in reality it’s one idea that that’s worth it for them or not and i don’t have like 10 amazing ideas i have one around one topic you know i don’t have but there’s there’s a there’s that’s why ben shtick is amazing because sean well you can only consult on your life experience and you like you can’t live that interesting of a life all the time and whereas ben can just steal he could just read a book a week and he’s going to have like you know 52 new ideas a year the thing that this guy was trying to sell me on was that i should come up and speak to his bank and he’s like you could get paid like easy like 50 grand a pop to come up and give sure that’s the point and i do 10 grand for a zoom at home to give a speech to somebody now um and how many of those and now i’m like why am i not doubling my price like uh if they’re not saying yes i need to basically the pricing strategy is if unless half the people are saying no you’re priced way too low and so right now everybody’s saying yes why not price double that i i did one recently it was 25 000 but it was in person yeah how many of those zooms how many zooms a month do you do not even one a month one every two months probably is the the current that’s pretty sick to me though yeah oh it’s great it’s i mean it’s like it’s great money because there’s this other thing ben i don’t know what the what the history or psychology will tell us about this but there’s extra joy in making money when you can assign what that money gets to go to versus just generally making money and it’s going to go into a general pot of a bank account versus like oh 10 grand all right if i’m like i do these two speeches this week this month i’ll go buy that car or i’ll go get my wife this gift and she’s like wow that’s great that hey this this work you did was awesome and uh i don’t know what the name for that metaphor is but i abused the [ ] out of that consumerism just consumerism so you guys can tell me if there’s ever a moment like the reason i’m not doing any of this stuff is i just feel fraudulent like going up there and that’s normal but yeah maybe i just need to get over it i don’t know 100 you need to get over it uh like the way you should think about things is most of your life you’re basically underpaid um you’re you’re underpaid and underappreciated and um you know the universe has this way of evening itself out where like um you know sam will make more money off of like some random investment he thought about for five minutes uh than he would of you know grinding some business that he his apartment finder business he did for two years or three years and so like you know the inputs don’t always match the outputs in life and once you sort of acknowledge that you accept that that’s like the first thing you have to acknowledge which is like the level of difficulty for me is not what dictates the value for somebody else so that’s number one yeah the the the effort is not in proportion to the output it’s irrelevant all that matters is the output the fact that you know input is a liability for you uh it is a weird psychological liability you would be better off not knowing how hard it was to say that one thing to that guy at that moment the second thing is that you know mr market will decide what it’s worth and like you might be you might get lucky once you might get lucky twice but if people consistently pay you for something it’s because that’s what it’s worth to them if not it’s worth not being worth more right they need they need a positive roi on that on that interaction and so just let the market decide and the market over time will balance itself out maybe maybe one one off yeah that was just a fluke but if it happens consistently enough and you should just expect it to happen consistently then it works i i i think you should lean into this hardcore because how much money are you making on ads for your pi say the numbers can you say the number do you want to do it or no yeah i guess i have one sponsor right now it’s full punch punch shout out club lunch go to the culture sam is the one carrying that sponsorship use code ben wilson for i don’t remember how much off 150 off something like that so i will say i’m making uh four four digits per month low four digits okay so one to five thousand a month um by the way also the hack when somebody says how many digits just take the bottom three numbers of that range so if i say i make seven figures i’m saying one to three million if sans we sold for eight figures it’s ten to thirty million if somebody say hey right like nobody if you’re over half you’re you usually say it differently once you’re once you cross the uh if you cross over 50 million you would say over 50 million not eight figures or like the figures can include the uh dot zero zero yeah there you go that’s a figure nine figure exit bro um so i think you should go and do this ben i think that you should include i think you should go hard on this so you have a 100 000 listeners a month you’re making single digit thousands of dollars for sure do your own ad read which basically says look yes you listen to this and i you know people who listen to this tell me they got a bunch of inspiration they got uh you know some strategies they got um they you know they filled in the gaps of something they didn’t know about history and they can see you know their place in the world today through that whatever blah blah blah some [ ] and you basically say uh you know i used to run ads for you know cold plunges by the way use code ben wilson at checkout if you if you want uh but you know actually what ended up happening and you just basically say this is what this is what ended up happening companies started hiring me to come in and talk to them about lessons from the greatest you know the greatest blah blah in history and um it’s motivational for the executive team it’s a great addition to any off-site blah blah blah and so that actually ends up making me more money than the ads so if that if you’re interested in that you should contact me blah blah i bet if you do that you’ll get one of these a month and it will quadruple your current ad um you know ad revenue for the month dude you got to do this man you’ve got to do this okay next next month uh we’ll do another segment in uh ben’s first million and uh and look you can make it as simple so my best friend neville medora he has the things that he calls consults and if you go to his blog like copywriting course.com like consult there’s just like a checkout page and it’s a thousand dollars and you booked one hour with them and you just you pay and then you just like select on calendly and then every like tuesday and thursday from like 9am to like one he just knows that he does that’s his call time and uh he makes a lot of money from it a year you could do it as simple as that the other thing by the way you need to do like a profile of how to check for the world of like uh i think you know you’ve done jobs but i think if you do like pixar uh right and you say you know here’s pixar’s kind of creativity uh process how pixar consistently has creative hits and um you know storytelling or something like that that opens the door for you to basically teach the pixar way to a bunch of companies that want to be better creative you know more creative or storytellers or whatever and replace pixar with any company that’s excellence in x category and you just tell your story as you always do and then that becomes part of your slightly more corporate repertoire that you know maybe they don’t want to hear the putin putin story but they they want to hear the pixar one yeah so you select the people by who will listen to this and then pay me money to consult or work backwards from that yeah i’m gonna go to apple and give them the the putin speech and then all of a sudden google employees start mysteriously dying i think i think this is good i think that so right now you’re uh you’re you’re slumming it because you’ve got a small business that you’re just starting and it’s gonna take time to get going we this will just supercharged it a little bit i think and by the way i always whenever i give advice the way i explain to people is i’m gonna say some things that make you feel uncomfortable either because you personally would feel nervous saying the thing i just said to a customer or quoting a pr quoting that price to a customer the second reason is your moral code says well that’s not what i want to do with my content i don’t want to feature pixar because i want to give talks about pic you know creativity and storytelling okay cool i’m just telling you if you crank the commercialization like sellout knob to 12. here’s what you could do and then you could decide to dial that back to nine uh or eight whatever you feel comfortable with and uh i always say it differently i say do you want your future kids to have braces or not like you ever been to an orthodontist my friend it’s expensive get to work oh that’s amazing that’s too good all right let’s do some other topics thank you ben i appreciate the uh good luck i do appreciate the advice i really do thanks guys that’s amazing right that that i was thinking about that for like about a week that’s hilarious i had no idea that was going on uh all right he mentioned it to us but he didn’t make a big deal out of it what do you want to talk about what do you want to talk okay um i know what i want to talk about well i don’t know if this is interesting to you but i’ve noticed that your angel investing is on a tear our friend suli just said whatever sean what did he what did he say whatever sean joke he was like oh i got this new brilliant investment strategy uh sean invests in something and then he tells me about it two weeks to two months later and then i paid 10x price for the same item for the same company it was great which is and he’s like anecdote he was joking obviously obviously that’s not great he’s like making fun of himself because that’s literally what’s happened in like i think six or eight deals now where i’ll i’ll even tell him about it but he just delays responding for a couple weeks or i forget to tell him and i tell him or he tells me about the company a few months later i’m like oh yeah i invested in that he’s like awesome can you make an intro and i make the intro and but the price has gone up like dramatically because the company has more traction or more whatever so that’s what he was joking about so i we i put you on like an email list for my friends where i’m sending you everything are you getting those no i didn’t see anything i sent you two of them so far okay maybe i need to i’ll afford it to them one of them i’ll send you after this but anyway so i’m i’m starting i’m i’m starting it off where i’m sending them to you so you gotta uh hopefully if you find something that interests me you’ll send back but how are you getting such good [ ] um i don’t know like dude it’s amazing so i feel like there’s i think the easy answer is oh cool i do this podcast and because of this podcast people come inbound right the bigger this podcast gets the more people uh want you to invest and there’s this great um thing my buddy vishal taught me when she goes startups are the only asset class like real estate doesn’t work this way stock market like in real estate if you want to buy it you go buy it if you want stock if you want to buy it you go buy it startups are the only thing where even if you want in you don’t just get in the security selects you the asset selects you just as much as you’re selecting the asset and that one insight is pretty important it basically means you need to build your brand and your like reputation so that people want you in deals um because the best deals are all like kind of like super competitive to get into um and you want people to when they’re first thinking of an idea to reach out to you because they know oh you know like for example i did a great deal recently and it’s so funny you’re gonna hate this it’s gonna piss you off so much you’ve been talking about short-term rentals somebody came to me with a short-term rental startup idea because they thought i was you or something or somebody was like hey bro why didn’t you send that to me by the way the subject line that she reached out with was last one in it was like hey i have the smallest bit of allocation left in this motherboard this is a company called hostfully you’ll love it because it’s it’s literally exactly what you’re doing you should get it i’ll enter you you will get in uh but but basically what they’re doing is you if you own a bunch of airbnbs which is kind of like a new market uh it’s basically like you’re a property manager so you’re more than just renting out your home or one home so you have multiple properties but you’re not a traditional property manager who owns a multi-family you know like uh building of like 32 units and so this is for people who run multiple airbnbs and it’s just like it makes your life way easier as the as the owner of that and they have like few million dollars in recurring revenue the valuation was great founder was really impressive so i was like oh yeah great sas software for people who manage multiple vacation rentals and then you’re over here building short sam short-term rental club building this community doing this thing and i got the benefit because people thought i was you that’s that’s one answer the piss you off answer that’s ridiculous that is a piss me off answer whatever it is what it is send me what i’ll send you what’s the company called can we talk about it yeah hostfully host fully well then i can just email her it’s is it uh do they have a bunch of uh uh vcs behind it or all angels um i think this rounds a lot of individuals i’m not sure it was like i was kind of late to the party so i was just pretty quick to just be like okay this makes a lot of sense uh you know the once once you have revenue and a few million dollars that’s recurring and they really haven’t even like figured out what their marketing strategy is going to be yet it’s like okay that’s a pretty good signal that this is going to work and uh it’s a pretty indispensable tool for a property owner so i like that one but i would say okay here’s here’s some of the things that have happened one is when i share deals with you you share deals with me my buddy julian shapiro shares like some of the best deals um he’s just very active he’s very like consistent with it meaning like every week he’s sending me some good [ ] um that’s i would say 40 to 50 of the portfolio is relationships with friends who themselves are experts and specifically people who are experts in one niche so it’s like we’ve been doing a bunch of like sales person software and it’s because we like have a relationship with craft ventures who it started by david sacks he’s kind of like the enterprise sas guy he built yammer sold it for a billion dollars his fund specifically just focuses on sas companies and what so david sends you stuff dave not me particularly so my partner romine uh who runs my fund he basically has a good relationship somebody at graph so for example when they’re seeing something good they’re just trading notes all the time and so we’re getting to get in on a lot of their deals so if are they giving you the deal because they like shawn or they like romaine in this case it’s romaine because uh he has that relationship he’s catching up with that guy every two weeks goes get coffee or whatever it is and but then i do the same with my guys right so i do the same with the people in india or the people in southeast asia because i’m like i think that’s where a lot of opportunity is and that’s where i have the right relationships so we’re sharing stuff uh just amongst that and then the other thing is like themes so for example once i decide that a theme is correct uh like worth worth betting on what i learned from suli actually is the level of aggression you need to have once you decide x is a good idea you need to go invest in that company and then like the five other companies that are like adjacent to it so for example there’s this trend of banking like neo banks right yeah so this started several years ago where people basically were like look banks are something everybody uses but has super low customer satisfaction scores like their apps sucked uh their marketing sucked so basically people are like look we can create like a digital first bank and this started like new bank is is probably the best example of this it’s in brazil they’re like oh look yeah and they’re about to go people are under bank there so they started a new bank a friend of a friend of mine uh was like led their investment and now it’s a 10 billion dollar company and it has like millions of customers in brazil and then the same thing happened in the uk with revolut and monzo whatever so this idea of neo banking basically of can you make super slick cus like slick app for customers digitally market to go get customers and basically you’re building um you’re actually not building the banking part you usually go partner with like some bank like bbva or something like that under the hood it’s bbva but the customer relationship is with uh with a company that’s really good at taking care of customers and building good user experiences anyway so that’s the the short answer is like okay decide that that’s a good idea and that takes many forms so like we talked about this before like ramp or brex these are like brexit i think was the fastest growing yc company in the last few years and you look at it you say is this a good idea you say well what are they actually doing they’re basically giving credit cards to some group of people that were dissatisfied with current credit card providers brex did it for startups and they get a portion of every time that card swipes oh interesting so if a million people are spending a thousand dollars a year on it and they’re keeping 1.3 of the interchange fee of the debit card or whatever you can come up with some number you say wow this company’s going to get big pretty fast so we did that math of neo banks how much is the neo bank customer worth and how much is a credit card customer worth and then we went and did it in every niche we could think of so we we invested in keep which is doing this for canada and then we invested in uh pluto which is doing this in the middle east but but did you holler at them yeah then we go search and destroy basically it’s like how do you go hunt for the best companies that are doing this in either this geography or with this customer base so for example and you just dm them on twitter probably yeah exactly we just reach out cold dm and say hey i’m a believer in this for this system this reason what you’re doing looks super interesting would love to invest and sometimes it comes inbound sometimes it’s oh you got 100 things inbound but you know what you’re looking for so you quickly pounce on the four that fit your your thing aren’t you out of money at this point from the fun though i raised more money because i was like i was like before i thought dude uh you know will i get a million dollars worth of deals every quarter that are good deals i’m not just trying to invest in crap so i need to invest in good deals so i i was like i don’t know how many high quality deals i’ll have and now um i realized that like whatever i whatever i had before was too low so now we’re doing almost two million a quarter uh we raised more money because we just had better deals man i because i’m starting so i started angel investing almost one year ago well i i did it five or eight companies person the last before that i forget and a couple of them have turned out to be like meaningful like turning 20 grand into like 300 400 500 000 and i’m like holy [ ] this is how it works and like but like it it sucks for a while right because you just invest it you’re like well that’s money’s gone and you don’t ever hear bottom and then you’re like oh nice it works and so i’m like in some of those cases those are huge markups in other cases i’m just now experiencing like two and three and four x markups and i’m like that’s awesome what would happen if that was had i invested in this company at a 10 million valuation instead of a 50 million dollar evaluation that would have been wild and like how do i do that well one of the reasons so i hated startup investing for for a while because i was like you know is this the best use of time and money dude it feels like an expensive hobby i’m just spending money and not getting anything in return and then i then i realized two things which is bezos has this quote which i believe he goes one of the biggest competitive advantages you can have is being long-term oriented basically if you prioritize like if you have a 10-year view where you’re like okay i’m going to maximize what i can do in 10 years and the other guy is trying to make the most they can make you know for their quarterly earnings call right this is how amazon worked right amazon was basically like we’re willing to lose money to invest so that we provide two-day shipping instead of seven-day shipping or free two-day shipping or a larger selection but it’s gonna cost us more because we’re gonna have more inventory or whatever so we’re going to go into all these other verticals books cds whatever they basically said like his strategy was long term this is going to be the most valuable strategy short term we’re going to get punished by the market because our quarterly earnings are not going to look great but that turned out to be the like magic you know the sort of like the biggest competitive advantage amazon had was their ability to be long-term oriented i think this is true just in general which is if you’re competing in somebody who they need a result in one year and you’re willing to be patient and get the result in five years seven years or ten years you can make bets that they can’t make so that means you get to have lower price bets um that will pay off bigger just over a longer time horizon so i think if you have the luxury of a long-term present that’s a competitive advantage that’s how startup investing works is if you need money or you you need to see positive growth in one year startup investing sucks if you’re willing to play a 10-year game this can be an awesome game to play and so do you think that well but do you think you you told me you’re like man i think i could three and a half x my fun because that’s average now it seems like it’s gonna be significantly more yeah like you know you think about kind of like what’s the floor uh you know i think a three and a half x would be you know a a solid outcome but you know nothing to write home about um but like with a small fund like ours you could see things where you can get a 15x you can get a 20x there are literally crypto small funds like ours that have had 100x they 100x the fund in in the period of time right so so you know you shouldn’t really the ceiling is high um but but the floor is is pretty reasonable so the first thing was okay long term oriented is a competitive advantage i i like start professing for that reason the second one is you want to do things that compound so for example if i wanted to beat the market in the stock market right i want to beat the s p 500 i need to have proprietary like intelligent i need to be smarter than anybody else about something and i think just being smarter at a game where money’s on the line is just really hard to do whereas if you do um if you basically say hey my advantage comes from my reputation or my my network of people that i know that’s just gonna compound every year the more deals i share with you the more deals you’re gonna share with me the more companies i have that are winners that’s gonna make it easier for me to get into the next winner or for founders to come reach out to me because they’ll say oh i saw you did these five indian unicorns i’m an india i want to be the next one of them so you should inve can you invest in me so compounding also comes into play here in a way that doesn’t happen in the stock market and doesn’t even really happen in real estate real estate has it to an extent but but not in the same way as how fast your reputation can compound and start investing so anyways those are my two reasons why i now actually view startup startup investing as a as a game worth playing because it it uses two of the superpowers that uh that i believe in that i think most people undervalue is it gonna what do you think we’ll earn more the ecom thing or this angel investing thing uh probably for me personally the ecom thing because i just own the majority of that company so you know if it sells for fifty million dollars or a hundred million dollars you know i’ll own the majority of it but uh whereas with startup investing you know it’s like my fund invests a hundred thousand dollars we own point eight percent of this startup i personally have twenty percent of the carry but then i share with romaine and ben and zach so i personally own 14 point something percent of the carry or whatever sure you know so it’s not like you know you’re owning a slice of a slice of something big versus just owning them you know how it is owning the majority of something that sells for a decent chunk is is just better financially it’s so much better and yeah i think that whenever people raise money i’m like are you sure man you might be able to sell this for 50 million dollars and you’ll make more money than if you raise money and sell for 500. yeah exactly now you know but i have to operate that other business whereas startup investing is like you know a joy right you just read about cool ideas you meet meet awesome founders and you say yes you write the check and then they go do the hard work so it’s a you know just a different thing can i you brought up uh sdr’s short term that’s what i they’re called short-term rental sers have you researched that at all so i joined your club but uh [ ] crazy right did you do two things did you used to review it yeah i was i’m i’ve been looking at some of these posts dude did you see like it’s like techy guys it’s like people who have like 100 million dollar company by the way i don’t know how you founder of facebook but like every time i open facebook whatever you’re working on is always the top [ ] post on my feed i don’t know if facebook just knows that i love you but like if it was true at the top if it’s sam talking about his cold plunge it’s sam’s video of his cold plunge naked at the top like you know the what hits in the facebook algorithm in a way that like i don’t understand i’ve always been like that it’s always been that way for some reason i mastered facebook and that sucks because it’s the least valuable uh i figured out what you’re talking about wow because i can only have five thousand friends on facebook yeah doesn’t matter your groups are big okay so but tell me what that group is sick right how many people are saying a thousand thousand people in this group and people are basically posting hey guys here’s the properties i own and they show a bunch of cool photos my strat like for example my family owned five big short-term rentals in kissimmee florida which is five miles from disney world so his strategy is basically airbnb near disney world i have a full-time job i’m a phd student blah blah and um and uh and then they’re showing like these uh disney themed rentals that they have and people go ask questions at the comments and then everybody’s got this like you know you’re doing your your magic thing where everybody feels comfortable telling you how much money they’re making and uh everyone’s sharing a bunch of good info so so i think that’s really cool what i wanted to hear from you is give me the top two most interesting stories that you’ve learned i’m gonna tell you i uh i’ve gotta be a little subliminal about this um so in that group there’s 11 or 100 or a thousand people i met one person that’s got 35 million dollars in homes he owns about 20 of them and he’s currently making about a million close to a million dollars a month in profit and was this person wealthy before this how do you get to the 35 million dollars worth of real estate they were mildly wealthy they were worth probably 15 million dollars they had a business that they sold yes they were not poor and they invested a lot of it into into into short-term rentals and now they have a staff of a couple people who are full-time and his take is like 800 grand a month and i met another guy who worked at a hedge fund and his name’s richard if you google richard he’ll tell he has a story in there and he eventually quit his hedge fund now he owns 50 million dollars worth of short-term rental rentals and the themes that i’m seeing are this one institutional capital has not come into short-term rentals a significant amount two the numbers might be inflated because the economy is crushing but i’m not entirely sure if that is totally the case but definitely could be the case three a couple years ago it was people were just buying places without doing much math and the math like worked out when you they’re making 25 returns it’s crazy now it’s a little bit more challenging but it’s still a lot of opportunity and uh it’s sick man like i i’ve been learning all about it it’s wild so of all the things you’ve read in here what uh what what seemed like the smartest what i’ll call small ball strategy so throw out the guy who’s had 15 million bucks and now he’s built this big thing who’s done a small ball start small grow grow it and maybe in some niche that’s a cool cool story out of this or you don’t say who but what is the what do they do is a million dollars considered small so if you buy property for a million dollars you’re going to put down 150 grand for some of these guys there’s a guy in there yeah if you go are you in the group right now search the word coconut there’s a guy who bought a plot of land on a it was a coconut farm in mexico and he put four i think tiny homes and he rents them for 150 a day uh in mexico and he did really nice landscaping but not complicated stuff it looks beautiful do you see it is it uh something farms yeah can i say the name or no safa farms yeah yeah yeah safa farms so click it so six cabbages created this like so so it says a tiny eco hotel farm six cabins one house an in-ground fire pit at a pool in mexico and uh it looks cool it’s basically like a bunch of wooden cabins that look like really small you know one-person two-person kind of stays and then like really cool outdoor area with hammocks and pools and uh you know common areas and places to go do yoga with like chickens running around you is that wild and he talked about it in the post i don’t think he spent a significant amount of money to set that up but he just it’s minimalist ish it’s kind of nice but it’s definitely minimalist but it’s it’s lovely and so that’s a really cool thing i’ve seen a guy like that like that is really interesting and what they do is they go and stay there a couple weeks out of the year dude how cool is airbnb that it created this opportunity for anybody to say hey look if you can create an awesome experience for people like a great a great place to stay a unique way a place to stay we will give you money you will be able to make money just by creating this cool little farm and huts set up in uh villa corona mexico how sick is that and then on the other side it’s like hey you want to travel here’s the here’s the the buffet of like dope experiences that’s not just cookie cutter hotel that you can go stay at like how sick is airbnb that’s just it’s in respect it’s amazing it’s amazing and what i’m learning is so basically the order of importance is when you’re looking for it’s just like content it’s just like scrolling through youtube and so if you look at it through that lens you can make a lot of money for example when you’re buying a property you go on zillow and you look at their thumbnail pictures you’re like what catches my eye and then if you don’t see anything there you’re like all right that nothing here but like oh they took a bad picture here but if they changed the angle here and they made the light at sunset this will look beautiful and so you’re basically shopping for thumbnails and uh and then the second thing that you’re wanting to do is you’re not shopping in any place in which you have to create demand and so you use air dna and it shows you who has the highest book and booking rate and then um the third thing you do is you pick a very specific niche and you have one unique thing about the property for example you call it a zen a zen thing because you’ve got like a little pond on the front or what i’m gonna do is you call it like has a fancy gym or has a putt-putt course or has uh like one unique thing right right like deck with view of sunset and so you want that one unique thing and that’s the same thing that’s the same way how content because it lets you reimagine okay if this home was not for a family of four to live every day and go to go to the grocery store and come home well then maybe this little space instead of a you know a living room that’s about you know just two couches and a tv it’s like maybe this is actually where companies are gonna come for their retreats and it’s actually gonna be different groups of 25 at a time and they need a big sauna in one area and then they need a pool area and a barbecue pit that’s like i will over invest on these things and i will i don’t need to have these daily utility functional things that a normal house would need right and it’s just been so fascinating because i didn’t realize how many like tech nerds are into this stuff that group is so cool it’s so interesting and uh anyway we don’t we can move on but i thought i thought that was i thought it’s just an interesting world that i’m falling into so like you know rohan from pricinomics he basically he didn’t tell me this but it appears as though price economics is on the back the back burner and all of his time is on short-term rentals and he owns like seven of them it’s it’s badass man it’s a super interesting market yeah i just want to give money to this group and just be like hey uh you know anybody who wants to like trick out their their place and you know whatever or buy their next property hey i’ll just finance it with you and share cash flow if you want to you know how you can have some preferred return that’s fine so that is the thing that’s interesting to me there’s no such thing or there aren’t many funds so like you and i have invested i think you did as well in like a blackrock like investment fund that like buys like 500 walgreens and they just make five percent there should be one of those for short-term rentals just because if you believe in that category you can have a reit or skin in the game somehow that’s passive right yeah that’s wild um okay let’s do let’s do one other thing uh let’s see i got a couple let me give you let’s do let’s do two quick ones okay um tailgate guys have you ever heard of this business so this this came up at farm con so i go to this dinner with this guy he listens to the pod and he was telling me i was like you know uh i was trying to make small talk at this dinner where i was like okay i hate normal small talk like i’m not just gonna oh yeah how’s the conference going good yeah good how about you good good um and i also don’t know anything about farming so like it’s not relevant to me so you know okay i can ask them a bunch of questions you like corn too yeah exactly you know i don’t have much to add so what’s your favorite type of corn so i was a bit of an ice breaker i was like um i was like first job like what was your first first job first first first i don’t know i asked did you have a side hustle in college and i went around the table i was like did you have a side because everybody was doing something different now and they’re all established now but did you when you were in college have a side hustle and everybody had an interesting one so this i put that in my question bank of like ah interesting uh you know fun little combo when you’re in a kind of entrepreneurial group so one guy tells a story he goes yeah dude i um i think he went to like ole miss or like what alabama or like one of these like southern football colleges and he’s like i created a um like tailgate in a box like what he’s basically like yeah like tailgating is huge before the football game people go to the parking lot and they want to grill and drink and play beer pong and do all the stuff and um he’s like you know for he’s like my family used to like to do it so he’s like first my family it was so competitive so you had to go wait like kind of overnight to get your spot he’s like so they would send me i’d have to go down to the i forgot what was called the grove or something like that and i’d have to wait in the parking lot and hold my family spot then i started to be like okay cool you got the spot well like well you got to set up the tailgate for us like come on we need uh tables for beer pong and we need this and that so he’s like okay i’ll i’ll get the stuff every week and i’ll go do it and he would create a good setup and then the space next to him was like hey dude can we next week can we just will you set ours up and he’s like all right uh you give me like 200 bucks i’ll get you guys some stuff like yeah sure and then the price goes up and he’s like oh my i can basically charge each little tailgating square like each little group of friends 500 to just set up a cool tailgate spot for them turnkey tailgating and so he did this at his college and he’s like dude i was making thousands and thousands of dollars every semester running this um and i was like is it i googled tailgate guys did it get acquired so so that was their competitor so there was a nationwide version of this he was doing this at small scale that was his college side hustle just to make a little bit of money he’s like yeah tailgate guys tried to come in but uh they couldn’t break into our market like we owned our market and i was like who’s tailgate guys he’s like oh these guys basically took this idea and they started doing it nationwide and i was like that’s really smart he goes but how does it work do you have like you just hire college kids and you say we’ll give you 50 50 an hour for three hours on saturday we get 50 you get 50 exactly and then do they do the kids go to like walmart and buy the stuff i think either you give them the supplies in bulk or um or they have to go grab it and you tell them hey you need to get this table and these bowls and this beer this whatever whatever and you use like a company credit card something that has exactly and so tailgate guy and what they do the key is they would partner with the school they would say hey we’d like to be the exclusive uh tailgate provider for the school and the school would give them the license and so they had a monopoly and i was like what and it’s like yeah actually this is pretty common that schools will basically pick one vendor provider they’ll sell the license rights basically they’ll let you become the official you know north carolina you know you know the tar heels they link to you instead you call it tar heel tailgate and it’s like their thing and you pay them a fee or a revenue share of what’s going on but in exchange you get a monopoly you get to be the only provider of this [ ] and it’s like super viral right because you’re just like everybody sees wow that setup looks not bootleg what is that oh they use tailgate guys or whatever okay cool we should use them next time and uh so tailgate guys apparently like i think they got bought out by private equity or something but they um they were doing like i don’t know 30 to 50 million dollars a year doing this what and um and i thought what a great example of a college hustle that you then scale up you say all right if this works at my college it’s going to work at every college and every college that has a football program that has tailgating and then we have this repeatable sales model of going to the university and we tell them hey these other eight universities partnered with us we’d like to partner with you you get extra income and we will provide a safe uh you know convenient way for your your fans to do this i thought that’s pretty this is a really cool little niche business and then i started thinking well what are the other ones what are the other businesses that use the same sales tactic of basically partnering with the school and becoming the exclusive provider so we had a little mini brain mini because the guy listens to the podcast so we had like a mini brainstorm session at dinner where he’s like dude this is happening also with scooters uh when like bird and lime came out in cities companies decided oh shoot we should become the exclusive scooter provider on campus like we’ll go drop these scooters all everywhere it’ll be branded by this with the school the school will get a rev share for every scooter ride that happens and we get a captive market that nobody can compete with us in and so this started happening with scooters and i was like oh damn what else could be done because scooters is cool because it’s a new category right tailgating worked because it was a new category so you just have to think about like what’s something today that they don’t even really have a um like an option for like they’re not really there isn’t really like a market for it you’re creating the market what did he say well we were kind of brainstorming you know he’s like you know one of the hard things is now schools have gotten slightly wise to it they won’t give the license up super easily meaning like they want to make sure they get a fair shake so once you come to them with the idea they’re like great hold on 90 day proposal request for proposal period where we’re going to go like see who wants to offer this to us so we’re going to go talk to five companies before we just say yes to you but in the good old days you used to be like oh they should be like sure you know you came to us so you get the deal i um i i’ve learned a little bit about um selling to schools i i you frozen oh there you are i sent you uh this company it’s called kira cubby it’s kind of a bad name pure cubby but basically it’s i just sent it to you actually i told joe to send it to you do you see it no and what they do is it’s like the most boring thing ever so basically this guy uh stephen he had an autistic kid his kid was diagnosed with autism and he goes i don’t feel like sending him to a normal school i don’t think they’re gonna do anything so he started a school and he like 20 kids in the neighborhood went to the school and he was like man managing this school so first of all that’s amazing second of all he was like man’s school is that pain in the ass right and so he so he found another parent in he lives in oakland so the other parents are like tech guys and he found uh this guy who sent his kid to his school and they decided to build this software together that basically makes it really easy to collect tuition payment and also pay your bills so basically like a bill.com or and then plus a quickbooks and then plus eventbrite so you can like check into after school programs and stuff like that and they are crushing it and it’s just four guys and they got it up to like 2.4 million in revenue recurring revenue and but he’s telling me all about selling into schools and it sounds like a nightmare selling into a school yeah i think it is uh you know the company who i think has done the best of this is mystery science have you seen them is that like a tv show what is that kind of okay so basically um oh wow they got acquired i didn’t realize this they got acquired last year no way 140 million dollars good for them they um okay so this the what mystery science was doing was they were like all right um how do we make uh like entertaining videos sort of like you know i don’t know pick your favorite analogy like blues clues or whatever you know reading rainbow or whatever the hell that’s called um magic school bus whatever and basically it’s on every topic so if you’re like you know how do why are plants green so they’re like we start with a question that any kid would have why are plants green or like um you know how hot is the sun and they’re like we’re gonna make the definitive most entertaining simple answer to that question and it turns into in some ways like a it’s like a game where it’s like the teacher can just pick one of those questions and be like hey class today here’s the question who wants to know the answer to this everyone’s like yeah me i want to know the answer like great we’re going to like have this little worksheet and this video and the video is gonna like tease us part of it and then we have to go figure out the next bit then we watch the next bit of the video so it makes it easy for the teacher to like teach a question that people are really interested in and they reached like four and a half million teachers countrywide like i think at one point 30 or 40 percent of all elementaries were using them so they had like dude how did they only sell for 150 million incredible um penetration it was it was absolutely insane they i don’t know why they sold for 140 million but i know that they basically raised very little money and they were super profitable and so i think you know for the guys they probably made you know over 100 million dollars off this deal and um you know they raised i think they raised only four million dollars like a lifetime uh it was a bit old they started in 2014 so you know seven seven years or so um and i think you know charging money is always is always hard but uh but these guys are super smart talk to the guy keith and i just really respected what they had built i thought wow what a cool product amazing that they’ve gotten this level of saturation and it was like the way they sold was it was like um you know like bottoms up in a way i think uh where like teacher it was just so like teachers couldn’t help but talk about it to other teachers because they were like oh this is amazing it’s like normally when i wheel out the tv well yeah it makes your job way easier so guilty i’m like copping out it’s like yeah we’re gonna watch a movie today class was like this is different this is like it’s interactive it’s based on questions it’s based on science and they’re like we’re just going to teach science this way and um yeah i thought it was amazing that’s so good this um yeah they reach 50 of the u.s elementary school market which is how much revenue were they making wild i don’t know at the time i was talking to them they were doing like somewhere between between 10 and 20 million in revenue profitably um and did they make money through ads or they like sold workshops so they sell the like subscription i think to them it was a subscription so to the software dude how do you reach that many teachers but only have and only sell for 140. that’s crazy to me yeah i don’t know um just wild anyways uh i gotta run dude i got a call with this uh crazy crypto thing that i’m trying to get into so i want to see if i can do that all right we’ll talk soon oh uh all right sean if you want to leave you can leave i think ben do i got to read out some names yes actually just one name all right we did this thing where we gave 60 minutes of shaun and i’s time what did the person have to do to win uh they had to review rate and review us on apple podcast great and the winner is is it ss yes spencer scott you are the winner has spencer he follows me on twitter he always replies to my stuff does he know that he won other than right now yeah i told him nice all right spencer scott’s a winner last week we gave the winner for the tick tock thing so we did this tic tac thing where if you made videos on any platform and you use the mfm clip uh hashtag you you could win five grand we gave three did we get three or two uh and then before that we did a contest where if you read and review us you won 60 minutes with shawn and i so we gave you that one to spencer scott and we’re gonna keep doing these we’re not doing it yet but we’re gonna keep doing them that’s the episode that’s the winner check it out