How to Network with Billionaires with Andrew Wilkinson

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 hey everyone we have a special episode with andrew wilkinson um i’m gonna tell you about him in a second i think you’re gonna like this episode but i have a huge favor so look shawn and i we spent a ton of time preparing for this podcast uh like hours tens of hours a week uh 20 30 hours a week preparing just for these two episodes and i know it sounds like we’re kind of shooting the [  ] and in a way we are but we actually work so hard at it and i need a favor from you i’m begging you please leave us a review in itunes so if you’re listening to this on spotify just click click your podcast app or whatever it’s called an android and go to the itunes store and just leave us a review click five stars and just click like i really like it or leave one star and be like hey sam you suck whatever but we need reviews and the reason why we need reviews is we go higher up in the charts and the higher up in the charts we go the more listeners we get and the more listeners we get the more ad revenue or hubspot money we can make which we can then put back into the show and do more stuff if you’ve noticed we’ve hired a team to create videos we’ve done that because we’re getting we’ve been getting more views and we’re able to invest more into this podcast um and we want to do more stuff we actually want to go on a live tour this summer and we want to come to you we’ll do it for free um but we need to get more listeners and the easiest way to do that is just to leave a review i know you hear a lot of pockets saying do this and most of you are just like kind of skip to this part but for real do it in fact if you do do it and you send me an email sam at thehustle.com or uh i prefer you do this you tweet at me the sampar and take a screenshot of your review and make sure i see it and i’m going to call all of you out everyone who leaves a review i’m going to call you out um i’ll i’ll either do it on twitter i’ll do this on the podcast but i’m going to recognize you for doing it so please make that happen uh i have a feeling that this podcast is going to get listened by a lot of people and so um get that in sooner rather than later so i don’t miss it but go ahead do that uh and it’ll be a really big deal for us so leave a review please now let’s talk about today’s episode so today we have andrew wilkinson andrew wilkinson is a good friend of ours he’s really interesting because he does everything so basically andrew started with this design agency called metalab he grew metalab to like 50 million dollars in revenue out of based out of canada and it was very profitable something like 20 30 million dollars of profit on like 50 million dollars in sales something like that and using that profit he went and bought a variety of companies and at this point they owned like 20 different companies uh ranging from a bakery up to different types of uh software so he just bought this company called girlboss he uh uh bought a few others and on this podcast we’re going to talk about what companies he’s buying and why he’s buying them he’s also done a few interesting things like you ever read about how someone bought a lunch with with warren buffett uh well he did that with a bunch of different investors and that’s really fascinating so give the episode a listen uh look up andrew wilkinson and uh he’s on twitter he’s very active if you tweet at him he’ll reply if you tweet at me thus sampar i’ll reply as well uh sean did not make this episode because sean has a four-week-year-old baby so that’s why we’re doing some of these extra episodes about them but please leave us a review let me know what you think abreu how did you rate this episode i forget what you you gave it i think this was definitely in the a’s we we covered a lot of ground a bunch of stuff andrew brought the heat as always a bunch of opportunities i think everyone’s gonna like it hey today’s episode is an a uh that’s good i’ll take it what was your favorite part uh he had a ton of stuff on how he grows his network andrew’s super smart he has like a bunch of billionaire friends and he kind of lays out his strategy of meeting all these people and i think that’s applicable to just about anybody listening all right well everyone give it a listen please please please give us a review i’m telling you i’ll owe you big time and it actually makes a huge difference and me and sean we read every review and we actually talk about all of them we’ll say is this person right should we keep doing this or this guy uh tease us for doing xyz should we actually stop doing that what should we do so we read all of them leave us review uh listen up see you i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back all right what’s going on not too much man beautiful day here in victoria what about you uh nothing we uh i’ve been spending all my time on this podcast trying to make it huge we’ve got some really cool stuff planned and i’m excited to see it work out yeah i feel like you guys are really ramping up there’s a new episode in my inbox like every single day well what’s yes it’s going really well and we did the math and we’re like if it grows if if the last 16 months repeats itself um it’ll be we’ll be at a million downloads a month by like uh decemberish uh which is fine which is great but figuring out how to like hack this has been really hard and so we’re just trying to figure out how to make it huge well what’s hubspot what’s their goal their goal so the hubspot has a bunch of cool stuff uh that they’re launching basically like a bunch a bunch of content initiatives including podcasts and their goal is to reach uh a certain number like i don’t remember the exact number but they say like how do we get to 100 million monthly uh newsletter reads podcast lessons things like that so 100 million monthly audience of mine and they’ve just done the math on you know if five percent of those people convert into hubspot customers then it makes it pays back the acquisition or something why no that’s across that 100 million that 100 million is across all their content um it’s not just the hustle and the hustle right now the hustle we have close to 2 million monthly or 2 million subscribers of which like 50 60 open rate so that’s adds to the 100 million um and so this podcast accounts for right now 400 500 000 eventually it’ll be a million a month and then if they have other podcasts that’s another let’s say 10 million so then we’re at 50 million and then where’s the other 50 million going to come from and so uh that’s kind of how they’re doing the math like how does it change for you going from like staring at your p l every month looking at the bank account freaking out about invoices not getting paid to suddenly going oh i don’t have to do that i just have to focus on growing the audience yeah so it’s pretty great like a lot of people hubspot never said this but a lot of people were like man you’re only going to work there for like a few months or a year and then you’re going to want to bail and frankly i’m having a great time um like i think i’m meant to start a company again and i this is my first job i’ve ever had but it’s been really great and i can see myself doing this for a little while uh because it’s awesome like and like let’s like talk about the obvious which is like i made money for myself so like i can relax a little bit i uh it’s not as hard like i’m working a lot long hours but it’s not as hard because if i fail or screw up like i’m not going to like cost people their jobs do you know what i mean like if i make it wrong decision i’m not necessarily going to lose a lot a significant amount of money or someone’s gonna have to be fired because i can’t make payroll so that the lack of stress is so good have you ever have you noticed have you noticed like your cortisol levels are dropping and you’re just more chill interesting dude i’m like never i’ve never felt that i’ve never felt that because i’ve always had there’s always been so many different businesses that anytime we’ve sold one i’ve been neglecting another one for a year and then that blows up and i get all stressed out so it’s been i’ve been thinking about this a lot but i’ve been going from stress to stress for and like seven or eight years probably since we sold our our one of our first companies and uh i’ve been thinking lately like i’m going like holy crap i gotta de-stress and that sounds really nice to not have to think about any of that stuff well the way i described it so what i describe when i like uh moved out to san francisco and like put by stake in the ground like all right i’m gonna figure this out i felt like i’d been living with poor eyesight and i finally put glasses on and i’m like oh this is the world like i could do anything i could do this i could finally see now after selling it’s like a different put my glasses on and realize i had poor eyesight where i’m like to my wife now i’m like oh my gosh is this how you feel all the time like you don’t have to worry about x y and z what a crazy feeling this is actually quite nice now i want to put that stress level back on again eventually but it’s nice having that break um and what i think about with you is i’m envious of what you have in some regards right i think we’re always envious of of other people especially our friends i’m envious that you’ve built this huge awesome empire that you own nearly all of it that you have virtually all the control that’s very most people envy you because of that but i also think to myself wow andrew also hasn’t chilled probably for a minute and that’s definitely the downsides and so like in order to be the best you definitely got to wear that which you are you have to worry uh carry that worry backpack a fair bit oh yeah it’s crazy and it’s so funny like the numbers just get bigger right so it’s like i you know i i remember in like 2012 one time we like did payroll we didn’t have enough money and like my business partner literally lent me money out of his personal account to close payroll right so we’ve been at that level of stress and you know i never feel that now you know we have enough money to go for years or whatever it’s a very different thing but there’s still that feeling of like oh [  ] there’s like 600 700 people relying on me to pay for their meal ticket every single month um and there’s just constantly people problems right so yeah i’ve got like you know a lot of control and buck stops with me and you know a lot of the things that people might envy but at the same time like we’ve got 30 plus companies and there’s always a problem to think about or whatever and i’m realizing i’m just constantly i think i’m addicted to cortisol and stress and this year has been extra difficult because what i used to do is i’d work at a cafe i’d like wake up like pounding stress cortisol i’d be all pumped up i’d do like three or four hours of focused work get all the stuff i need to get done but then i’d go work at a cafe and my buddies would show up and we’d start shooting the [  ] and go for a walk and play tennis and just just kind of half off and now with covet it’s like i’m in a house from 8 30 in the morning until five and then i go see my kids and it’s crazy um just the importance of like distraction you don’t get that like right now working remotely in a house you just don’t get those moments uh the automatic breaks and stuff and so i’m realizing like man if i’m left on my own devices i’ll i’ll just stress to the nth degree and just keep working do you think and this was the last question i asked about this because i think i always try to be self-aware where it’s like oh a bunch of dudes complaining about [  ] that maybe like is it like it’s right yeah well my reply to that is it is a great problem it’s but great problems are still problems first world problems are still problems but they are first of all problems but um do you think that it will ever get not or ever not be stressful like you know we you talked about dan gilbert last time this uh billionaire guy who’s got all this stuff going on you said that he was pretty calm and present do you think that even a guy like him who kind of has it all or i mean people think you and i have it all i imagine as a guy like him who we think has it all do you think that they still stress i think i think it’s it’s interesting i think dan’s probably really stressed out or at least was because he has so many different things that he’s responsible for where if he doesn’t intervene it messes up there’s different versions of really successful people though think about it like is someone who runs a private equity firm where they have this big pool of capital they oversee and they just buy businesses and they oversee them or whatever or or someone who like a hedge fund manager who buys stocks right you can have 20 employees you invest in apple and all these companies and at the end of the day apple does well or it doesn’t and you don’t influence that right i think the number of things you influence is what causes the stress and i think in our business we we go oh man if i’m not scanning the sky for you know issues in all of our businesses we could lose something or mess up and um i don’t know it’s a it’s a double-edged sword because think about like think about like your parents or old people and like they get upset about like oh the neighbor moved in who you know doesn’t want to water their lawn or someone’s dog keeps pooping on their front step or whatever it is that stresses them out as much as you and i get stressed out about business so i think everyone’s programmed to be stressed and i think it’s more about what tools you have to distract yourself from the stress and if you’ve got a lot of those then you’re happy okay so let’s work here’s the tool that we’re going to de-stress you perfect segway so for the first topic today we are going to talk about things that both you and i have invested in most of them are going to be things that you’ve invested in and we’re going to span we have one two three four five six okay we’re going to spend about three to five minutes depending on how interesting they are where each other whoever listed it on here will say what it is and why it’s interesting and then i want to comment and tell you what i would do if i was you and you and vice versa um but i want to hear your intel or your your behind-the-scenes look as to why you are investing in this and why it might not work and why it will work like why it could work and so uh does that sound good yeah sounds great all right the first one you bought this company who we’ve had sophia omarosa on the podcast you bought her old company called girlboss is it just girlboss.com is that the url girlboss.com yeah and what is it so girlboss is like a like a media company for women so sophia started it about six years ago and built up this massive following started doing amazing events podcasts uh built like a social network and she i met her when she was first starting it and she’d um done nasty gal which was like this big flame out where she built a really amazing business was doing 30 million dollars a year doing online e-commerce selling or used clothes doing really really well right she didn’t need the money and she ended up raising from venture to take a little bit of money off the table and then the venture investors got in and we’re like hey you got to 20x this go take risks start retail stores she starts the retail stores and it all blows up a really horrible story where she had a good thing and then she risked it and then it blew up and so she was fresh off of that and she said look i’m starting this company girl boss i think i want to bootstrap it and and you know i might raise a little tiny round but i’m not going to raise venture again and so we ended up investing um and following along and she ended up raising venture again i don’t know what it was specifically i think she saw like a bigger opportunity and decided to do it and the terms were great um but so she raised venture and decided to build like you know all this stuff like a social network for women building an app all these really expensive r d projects um and it got to a point where um it just wasn’t working and it wasn’t venture scale and so she sold it to these guys attention capital uh in new york and they like they’re uh joe and uh nick right i think they’re yeah they’re like guys and they yeah they they basically uh they they focused on the event business they had all these massive contracts that were booked and then coveted hit and they just got themselves into a pickle where they just couldn’t the numbers didn’t make sense they were burning too much money they lost all these contracts and so they nudged me and said hey would you be interested in buying this and i said look i i i will buy it only if i can just buy the assets because we looked it and we said hey they’ve got two million social followers they’ve got a huge newsletter all the piece they’ve got a massive podcast feed all the pieces are there but the cost structure um was venture right so like they had you know a big p l they had a ton of employees and we looked at we went okay what if this company had five employees could you run it with five employees and is that how many you have now uh now now i think there’s maybe seven or eight or something like that but we started with basically you know one person doing newsletter one person doing podcast one person doing social and then we just said as we sell more ads we’ll hire more people and we ran it like a bootstrap business and so that’s what we’ve been doing um and i think you know sophia uh was pretty nervous when we bought it right she’s like don’t embarrass me uh you know make sure you hire the right people and so we worked uh you know in close partnership with her and she’s actually been really stoked about what we’ve been doing so that’s been awesome yeah i just uh you just you just announced a new ceo i think you hired me yeah totally um so okay so okay can you talk about any of the like the size these two million subscribers two million social followers how many email subscribers uh about 250 000 so i can’t share the the acquisition price that’s fine um but it was it was uh you know it was let’s say let’s say i i felt it was a value investment based on the social followers but if you looked at it on a p l basis it was like holy crap this is a mess right because they’ve been losing a lot of money okay what would you be happy with this company in two years um like how much monthly revenue yeah what’s cool about it is when we when we buy a business uh we’re generally going you know if we’re wrong about all the big opportunities and we’re only right about just base hits so like hey you know we’ve got 250 000 newsletter subscribers can we sell 40 or 50 000 a month of ads on that if we do that we’ve got a good little business and then if we do that on the podcast we’ve got a really good little business and then if we do that on social again it’s bigger and bigger and bigger it doesn’t need to be huge based on the price we paid it could do three million bucks a year in revenue and be an amazing business and give us a good return i think it’s a 20 or 30 or 50 million dollar a year business once we kind of do the events we’ve been thinking about you know all sorts of opportunities within the business um but uh what i like about it is you know if we don’t do well if we don’t grow it into a huge company we’ll still we’ll still do just fine so i agree with that assessment i actually think that so long as you’re mildly competent which you are uh the worst case scenario is is two million dollars a year i would say 160 a month yeah based off of a quarter of a million email subscribers two million um social followers now it won’t wouldn’t exactly be exciting or it wouldn’t be the most fun thing and that would be uh uh like if that was the worst case scenario it’d be like man we really mis missed the mark on this but you’re not going to go out of business and you’re probably not going to lose which is pretty good so i actually agree with that uh assessment i think that if in 10 years if you were at 30 million a year in revenue i wouldn’t be surprised it would probably be it would probably be 15 uh it’d probably be 20 million dollars a year in advertising and 10 million dollars a year in uh user revenue so ticket sales more likely than not i don’t know if you would be able to get subscriptions to this maybe i actually do think that there’s i know a few uh people who have uh female focused communities and they do like three million dollars a year in revenue yeah i’m seeing like much smaller uh communities doing way higher revenue like we’ve looked at a lot of stuff for m a like for even for girl boss and uh there’s there’s definitely some people doing really really well with small communities so the way i’m kind of feeling right now like everything i look at um and we’re i don’t know if people how familiar they are with our structure but we mostly buy majority control of businesses and usually we’re buying them from founders and then off the side of our desk we also do a little bit of venture investing maybe like two or three million dollars a year we’ve got an angelus rolling fund for another i think 11 million or something like that um so my world is generally buying 11 million dollar what hold on you have an 11 million dollar rolling phone yeah that’s crazy right yeah we were it was insane we literally were like we tweeted it out as like an afterthought and we raised it in like four hours it was totally insane 11 million yeah i think we’re one of the biggest ones i think so i think that um you might be like the second or third biggest i think i heard of a 16 million dollar one but you might you guys might be number one you might actually size it up because it you can it’s limited just by the number of people and if you have uh there’s no amount so if someone wants to do five million bucks they can do um so there’s some people who are looking at more uh we’ve got uh angelus doing it they administer everything and then all right who’s this well i i decide right so basically i already make probably one one or two venture investments a month and it’s usually like you know a friend of mine emails me and says hey i’m starting a company or one of our agencies is working with a company that we think is cool or something and i just go okay well i’ll put in a hundred grand and now instead of putting in a hundred grand i put in 500 or a million via the rolling fund and i just invest my personal money into the rolling fund um so anyway so so we do venture investing i look at that as like a hobby it’s kind of like roulette right it’s just betting on friends having fun looking at companies um what i’m seeing in venture is absolutely insane so i’ve seen companies of um with with a founder who’s a first-time founder with an idea and they’re raising in a 40 million dollar pre valuation right like just totally crazy stuff and in the private market you know there’s all this crazy just endless money and low interest rates and stuff and almost everything we look at is just bit up like crazy like to the point where we look at it and we go i don’t see any world even if everything goes right where we can make our money back at this price and so for most of this year we’ve basically just been sitting on our hands and waiting um and trying to find hidden and what i the way i think about hidden value is like kind of like girl boss where you look at the p l and it looks like uh you know oh whoa this is losing a lot of money i don’t know how to value this but you look at it and go under our ownership what can this do and you make a new p l in your head where you’re like oh i actually need five people my only costs aws and mailchimp and and so we’ve been doing a bunch of that um and then really uh we’ve just been kind of sitting and waiting and getting creative right and i’ll talk about this guy henry singleton later we really are just trying to um you know issue stock when it’s highly valued and buy stuff back when it’s cheap and so we’ve been looking across our portfolio and just going like how can we do m a with our stock or how can we buy cheap businesses and bolt them in that people don’t understand but it’s it’s crazy out there right now what okay but to play devil’s advocate and this is something that i’m playing with in my head of like what do i stand for what’s going to be my principles for investing and i haven’t settled on what those are yet although i have some guiding principles they’re not solidified entirely and a good friend of mine andreessen horowitz said don’t worry too much about valuation whatever’s hot will continue to be hot and you’re gonna like a lot of times the valuations looking back will be like oh that was cheap but then in the middle of it it always appears to be expensive but the real winners it won’t matter that much of course his lens through to looking at that is quite narrow albeit effective but narrow but what’s your take on that well i think i’m assuming andrew chen because i know you’re friends with him um i think they’re amazing investors the some of the best in venture i think the hard part is um you know if you’d taken that same approach in 1999 it’d be really hard to be a winner right because you see the same kind of stuff happening where uh historically i think we’re at an all-time high in terms of just like pre-money valuations but back then i mean there was companies that were pre-revenue selling for billions of dollars and all the same crazy stuff and the problem is within that haystack there’s an amazon right or an ebay or a google but you just don’t know which one they are and so i think if you were to go out and index and buy a hundred random startups in 1999 you’d probably lose money and i’d argue you’d probably lose money today if you went out and you indexed and i to me the only way i’ll bet on a someone um at a high valuation is if i know that they’re a proven operator like if they’re a founder who’s done really well historically and i have a lot of trust and think they’re amazingly smart i don’t worry too much about evaluation but dude some of the stuff i’m seeing is just wacky just crazy crazy stuff is there one thing that you’re seeing that interests you a ton that you’ve had the chance to invest in or uh you passed on but you still think it’s quite amazing so you’re saying that like you’ve seen i and i have two like ideas from people who don’t know what they’re doing or at least you don’t know if they know what they’re doing and they’re these huge valuations is there anything that you’ve seen lately where you’re like oh my gosh this potentially could be the coolest thing i’ve ever seen well i think if there’s one thing i’ve learned over the last 10 years it’s when you see something and you get lit up about it ignore the valuation and just invest right like it’s like there’s lots of companies that i was super excited about but i was like oh i’m a value investor i’m not going to you know do this on these terms what and i should have i mean i got i’ve got the ultimate like anti-portfolio of you know coinbase and uh slack and you know all sorts of other stuff i mean running an agency in silicon valley for 10 years like you just get you see all sorts of stuff right they turns out to be um big um i i think the most thing the thing i’m most excited about and nervous about at the same time right now is like crypto stuff and there’s a company i saw recently that i i didn’t get the opportunity to invest in but i think is genius so the crazy thing about crypto is like at least theoretically um historically if you are a member of a website like reddit let’s say and you’re an early user let’s say you’re the first hundred users have read it and you built it into something you actually derive no value right you don’t get paid you’re like a wicked wikipedia contributor and then reddit makes billions of dollars i know where you’re going with this one for the first time ever i could start up andrew reddit and i could say hey all the people who move over from reddit based on the number of followers you have or whatever your rankings are i’m going to issue coin in andrew reddit and as everyone moves over and posts more you become more valuable kind of like the big cloud thing right now big cloud’s kind of whatever bs but i think for the first social networks and network effects are actually vulnerable to this and one of the one of the businesses i saw that i thought was fascinating was a company called braintrust and what they’ve done is they’ve basically created a really nice upwork so it’s like uh you go to the website it looks like a really well designed version of gabe is this gabe yes i know gabe i uh uh a year ago when he was about to launch this and he told me all about it because he was hiring a content person um yeah i have not checked in on this okay so so i don’t know what he was doing a year ago but basically you go to this website and it looks like um you know up work it’s like hey hire contractors for design and development whatever you need but then it says no fees and i was like well how the hell do they have no fees that’s crazy because upwork charges like five or ten percent of all the projects and what they do very quietly is they have a coin and they have a brain trust coin and they have people who uh their job is to basically be a project manager on there those people get paid in the coin all the transactions occur in the coin so as you it’s almost like if uber had issued a coin to all their early drivers and then as they participate in the network they get rich and so they don’t go to lyft because they’re already rich in uber coin right and so it creates this lock in and it aligns incentives and before it was always this thing where it’s like labor versus capital and this is the first time it’s all aligned it’s all um you know very theoretical and early and i don’t know whether it’s a good time to invest right now but it’s obviously the future to me interesting and so let’s talk about this so for the listeners the guy who started this his name is uh gabe what’s his last name asta osteokote uh he’s got a two he’s got two last names him and his wife they’ve like hyphenated it so i forget his full name anyway he started a company called luna ostaseki or something yes yes yes um he started this thing called cal i forget what it was called cal tech or no not uh something um where it was like a lead gen site for like roofers and uh home services and it grew to like 30 million dollars a year in revenue um i don’t know how but in some way he cashed out maybe his partners bought him out or something like that and he started this thing brain trust about 18 months ago i think and so i actually will would email him after this and being like hey what’s going on uh you raisin this is really cool um i think i agree with you this is really cool and he’s a very proven entrepreneur now the thing i get nervous about when it comes to people like him is that will they be hungry enough to make it big i get nervous about that do you i don’t really think too much about that because i think we all know like you know you you’re gonna have this exit and you won’t be hungry in the same way where you’re like you’ll claw someone’s eyes out to you know to be successful you’ve already become successful but i think like over time it’s just like you start going like okay i proved it once now i have to do it again at double the size and it’s the same thing that everyone says where it’s like what’s the perfect amount of money it’s like two or three times whatever you currently have so if you exited for 30 this time you got to exit for 90 next time i it’s just i it’s just the way people seem to work god that’s great um all right let’s talk about another one um let’s do all right i’ll tell you this one that i just did the other day um and this one i actually think has more reasons why it will fail than why it will not fail why it will win it’s called tails um let me find the url uh i don’t even know i remember kaleswriters.com so i just i’m gonna uh text it to you so on the surface this has a lot of things that i don’t like uh it could it’s kind of like an iphone game type of thing um it’s pretty hit driven but i’m interested for in this for a couple reasons the first basically what it is is um it’s this technology where authors can upload their books that they’ve already written and they’ve made it so they can turn a pre-written book into an interactive story which is kind of interesting um but i invested it for a couple reasons one i’ve been crazy fascinated with how authors can make more money because i think books traditionally are a horrible way to make money off of someone who spends like you know two years of their life writing something like it’s pretty shitty like the difference like our friend jack butcher pro probably makes more money off his one course which impacts probably 10 000 people than a book that is read by a million people which is pretty crazy when you think i think it’s fascinating though because like i’m writing a book right now um i don’t know if i’m even going to release it i might just turn it into a bunch of twitter twitter tweet storms or blog posts or something or make a podcast out of it or that’s what’s interesting too is like when you have all that content you can take it and put it across all the different channels right like build it once put it everywhere and monetize it across all those different places well there is legitimacy there’s a legitimacy around i know to hand someone a book and say this is my story as i want you know to just to for you to understand it and you know it’s like phil knight is like the man because of shoe dog right i agree so that that like i don’t think a book is going to go away but i think that what you should do is write a book as like a loss leader and then do all this other stuff of which tails is one of those things and the reason why this business fascinated me is because i think that romance novels um anime and like entertainment like for amongst young folks and particularly women it’s like one of the biggest genres there is i mean it’s just a rabid fan base people love this stuff i invested in this thing because i think an author can charge like 30 for an interactive book and people will read it a lot and consume it a ton and there’s a company in china i’m always fascinated with how the chinese monetize content there’s a company in china called well the american translation is just called china literature it’s a 80 billion dollar publicly traded company that does something just like this in china and i’m fascinated with how authors can make more money i’m fascinated with bringing uh the chinese habits to america also the founder of this company had invested like 800 000 or something like that of his own money into the business and i was like oh that’s cool like you’re you’re you’re betting it i’m interested so that’s a recent one i did but there’s so many reasons why this can fail um it could be incredibly expensive to acquire users i don’t know if the users are going to even stay for that long and uh it could be a total hitch driven business so this actually has a lot of reasons why i can fail and has a couple reasons why it could work how the i think the hard part about this though is that you’ve got to do all this custom work on each book like i get they’ve built the framework but you’ve probably got to have someone illustrate like a comic almost for every single so that’s the technology that they’ve built it’s like they make it really easy for yourself like you’re the author to uh make it interactive so that’s like the whole point that’s like the technology behind it but uh we’ll see if they can pull it off it’s been around for 12 months so it’s a working mvp but uh tbd to see if this is gonna pull uh they’re gonna pull it off but that’s one thing i’ve just invested in um all right your turn what do you got what do you want to go over which one so um we just we just uh we keep investing in this business and it’s a lot of people don’t understand it it’s called medi-map and let’s talk about any map so so up in canada yeah m-e-d-i-m-a-p so up in canada uh we have socialized health care so the government pays for it and if you want to get um uh care you can’t just call any doctor and get in right so there’s this whole system if you want to see a dermatologist you have to go go to a you know general practitioner get a referral it takes six months in many ways it’s better because anyone who wants it gets health care but the quality of care is probably lower overall and what it’s resulted in is a system where a lot of people don’t have doctors and you have to go to a walk-in clinic and there’s always walk-in clinics uh you know all over canada and um this this guy came to me like five years ago um because i had invested in a few other healthcare businesses and he goes hey i’m going to build this business called medi-map and basically you’re going to be able to go to the website and you’re going to see the wait times at every single clinic in canada and i was like well why would the who’s going to fill out the times right like how are you going to and he goes well i’m going to convince the clinic owners that they want to be on this site and they should punch in you know the wait times every hour and i was like this seems insane like f off i’m not going to invest right comes back six months later and he goes hey i’ve got 25 of all clinics in canada using this and i’m like well like how did you do that and it turns out that every single clinic every day gets 10 phone calls a minute and all the phone calls are is hey what’s the wait time right because everyone’s trying to go where the lowest wait time is and so there’s this huge incentive all the clinic owners went oh my god i don’t have to have two uh medical office assistants i can just have one and that that one can just punch in the wait time so now this business has 86 of all medical walk-in clinics in canada and every single one has software installed wait time software installed on their computers so we’ve been investing in this business it’s been uh you know losing money and we’ve been building out this network right and our thinking is once we have the network there’s a lot of really interesting things we can do with the network and we’ve started expanding that so this is it started as a venture investment and then we ended up buying uh we now have a like a control position in it we’re about to buy even more of it and there’s a lot of models globally for this like zoc dock and other folks and so now that we’ve got the network established we have no competitors even if someone raised a hundred million bucks i don’t know how you go out and convince every clinic walking walking clinic owner in canada to switch to your software over ours and so we’re starting to now layer in physiotherapy naturopaths massage all sorts of other services and then we’re also integrating into the booking engines for all of these and these people can pay to promote their clinic and get more bookings and stuff like that so i’m super excited about it and it’s one of those businesses you might look at and go you know i don’t get it where’s the value um but it’s it’s really really cool and we’re super excited about it well i’m i’m on the site and i i typed in my location i’m like oh wait they’re just uh uh in canada it’s been like vancouver or something i did i just typed in vancouver okay so uh so the way it works is i typed in vancouver it says crossroads walk-in clinic closes at 7 00 pm as of right now they’ve got a 30-minute wait time i can click and i can join waitlist and then i tell i select a uh what i’m going to tell the doctor and how i want to do the visit yada yada yada so how do they make money does the doctor say no no the doctor is totally free to use um and the doctor can i believe the doctor can like make a nicer profile so they can upload their logo and stuff but we don’t make any money off of that right so the idea is over time we make a stronger and stronger network and we can start to get directly like like that one you can click to join the waitlist immediately and do that that’s all free what we make money on is when you go and you say oh i want a chiropractor or i need to find a pharmacy and send in a prescription or something we can do referral agreements with all those different clinics or pharmacies but right as of right now we haven’t monetized it like this is like how many people work there uh like five or six it’s very small oh it’s small and it looks like you got like according to similar web you guys are getting like 100 ish 50 to 100 ish thousand uh visitors a month and the traffic is mostly search and direct which is like the greatest thing ever i mean that’s exactly what you’d want um so i imagine you weren’t spending it it’s a unique database right like there’s nowhere else you can go in canada to get weightless times and i can’t i’m so you’re probably spending zero dollars on advertising is that right yeah we we’ve experimented a little bit with it but we we spend very little at this point so it’s going back to like understanding a moat and going like oh this is like no one can compete with this we spent the last five years losing money and building the and now it’s like there’s no way to disrupt this and think of all the different things you can build in this i always like to say you know we like to buy airport businesses and an airport is you know there’s one there’s one airport in the city if you want to go somewhere fly you’ve got to go and sit in the lobby for an hour and when you’re sitting in the lobby i’m going to try and sell you a bunch of stuff so i’ve got all the stalls and i can put in a massage place and i can put in a bookstore somewhere to sell sandwiches whatever and this is an airport business and right now all the stalls are empty and we’re going to start monetizing it and filling in all the stalls that’s a great analogy or a great story where did you learn that one because before you had new zealand businesses which i like where i made it up you made it up that’s a good one i like that one that’s really good uh i’m going to steal that one uh so like yeah medi-map i could see how this is gonna work if i had to guess i would say you’ve lost maybe six million dollars on this so far like uh yeah i think that’s that’s like i think exactly how much we put in that was a good guess yeah uh i i’m just doing the math as to you’re not spending you’re probably only spending money on five or six salaries a month plus hosting which comes out to be probably 85 to 95 000 a month you’ve done it for five years i just made that number up so when it goes back to if that was in the states it would have been more competitive right because canada in canada healthcare is is not privatized not a lot of people are moving into it and um and there’s just not a lot of venture competition so if we’re in the states we would have had to raise 30 million bucks move super fast be really aggressive but we’re able to kind of quietly go out and do this and build the network is zocdoc the nearest competitor i mean zocdoc i think they’re a multi-billion dollar company is that well they’re only um they’re only in the states right and so um you know i think they would be illogical if they ever if they were ever to move international they’d be a logical acquirer of medi-map and i think that they’re a great model right now we’re looking at it and going okay how do we roll out the zockdoc playbook or or find similar businesses elsewhere i don’t mean competitor but i mean it’s the zoc like the most the nearest yeah the nearest comparable zocdoc and that’s a multi-billion dollar company i think yeah that’s pretty cool um i’m looking i would imagine the thing with with this company is going to be backlinks and what’s interesting about you guys is um i’m looking at i’m looking at now you’ve got 750 referring domains which is actually lower than i thought you’ve got 7 100 backlinks but here’s why it’s kind of actually interesting the way that you’re doing it uh none of your all your traffic i imagine is going to be search like uh it’s going to type it you’re going to someone’s going to type in like this clinic wait time or this clinic phone number and you’re gonna show up like don’t call just click to see the wait time but what’s weird to me is in canada do you guys have dot gov websites is gov only an american thing no we have that it’s like well it’s like dove.gov.ca or something but i think i think we have.gov the reason i’m asking is if this is if most of your traffic is gonna come from search you are gonna and all the some of these clinics or i don’t know how the canadian uh i don’t know how your guys’s healthcare system is but if they’re a government-sponsored or government-owned healthcare clinic i would imagine it would have a doc this is the important distinction is they’re not government-owned they’re government-regulated so the way it works is a clinic and they’re they’re challenging businesses because the government basically dictates how much you can charge per visit and the government has to approve they have to be run by a doctor so it’s basically like you can make sliver thin margins um and that’s again why having someone calling all the time saving money on not having someone on the phone all the time is massive for a clinic owner but here’s what i’m getting at what i’m getting is is this actually could be a much bigger moat than i realized because if you’re getting a bunch of gov websites linking back to you a dot gov url is worth the seos out there will correct me but something like a hundred times more valuable than a dot-com and so i’m looking at this website if you could talk uh if though if i’m looking at your uh uh medi what’s it called uh medi-map i’m looking at the the clinics if they all link back to you and many of them are dot govs or dot orgs or or whatever or edus if they’re like you’re going to have a stupid amount of backlinks and you’re going to have a significant advantage over anyone because you’re just going to crush on search because google uh any govs are significantly high higher rank than a dot uh dot com and a dot edu so let’s say you can get a university clinic or something to refer back to you it’s going to be actually quite amazing i think and i would imagine this is the type of company that’s going to be slow slow slow slow slow and then all of a sudden it’s it’s just good it’s gonna be like oh like no one’s gonna catch us like nobody nobody gets this and they go oh you know there’s always virtual care like teledoc kind of stuff in canada and i just keep saying like well when you break your arm you’re not gonna go on teledoc right that’s a this is like a certainty like death and taxes certainty is people will always need physical doctors and yeah virtual will be 20 30 whatever but it’s uh it’s not going away it’s gonna yeah you don’t you i’m not gonna call the doctor when i have a kidney stone um so what why don’t you tell me about uh hustle plus i don’t know i don’t wanna i wanna i wanna i wanna do you wanna do hustle plus or can we talk about uh bakery and then cyber security and then yeah yeah sure okay totally i want to talk about bakeries so you is this the bakery that you’ve already bought so no so i own i own a bakery um i when i grew up my little brother worked at a local bakery just down the street from our house and uh uh yeah it was his first job and i used to go there all the time i got to know the owner um i used to help him with his computer when i was like 14. and he maybe like four years ago said hey look you know my parents are getting old i want to retire i’m thinking about selling my business and i was like well i don’t know the first thing about bakeries but he’s got a really good manager in place and i don’t want this to go to the wrong people like i literally grew up going to this bakery it’s like an institution in my city i love it uh and so i said you know f it i’ll buy it and so um i bought it and now i own an italian bakery in delhi and it’s actually a good little business it’s like that thing i always think back to of like if all this technology stuff fails and all my stocks go to zero i always have a bakery uh you know that’s that’s not going to go anywhere for 40 years um but the idea with the bakery so basically a couple months ago some friends and i did like a paleo diet challenge and i felt amazing but i had crazy carb and sugar cravings like i just wanted like a a treat basically and when you’re doing paleo you’re not allowed any grains or sugar and there’s hacks around that right so you can be like okay i’m having a something that’s sweetened with honey or coconut flour maple syrup or whatever those are all total bs right those all still spike your blood sugar if you eat a spoonful of table sugar versus a spoonful of maple syrup like it’s pretty much maybe a little better but equally bad for you and so i started researching otherwise uh what do you mean i would have thought that that was obvious yeah i mean a lot of people think like i talked to like uh you know friends of mine and they’re like oh i gave my kids these these uh really great snacks they’re sweetened with coconut sugar and i’m just like dude sugar is sugar and like if you wear a blood glucose monitor it’s insane so anyway so i started researching all these non-sugar sweeteners and trying to think about how to hack this and make some snacks that i could eat like stevia aspartame all the old all that stuff and i realized there’s this whole new generation of these so a lot of the old ones they have like you know stomach problems they cause dysbiosis or like stomach cramps and other stuff but there’s new ones that actually taste really really good don’t cause any blood sugar spikes and are relatively healthy like allulose and stevia and xylitol and so i actually found a baker i contracted the baker and i just said hey like make me five or six different things i want to see if you know i can make something interesting and i started making these chocolate chip cookies and you know blueberry walnut cookies and all this other stuff and they were insanely good and so what i would do is i would give them my friends and say hey i bake these cookies let me know what you think and they’d eat them and say they’re really good and i’d say well there’s no sugar and they don’t spike your blood sugar and they’re all healthy ingredients like almond almond flour and almond butter and stuff i started thinking about it and i was like um you know everyone wants to be healthy right now and they’re used to going to a bakery and eating something unhealthy given the option would they choose something that’s higher end and healthy but still taste the same or better so so like you know think about mcdonald’s mcdonald’s was the standard in the 90s now there’s chipotle if you’re a little more health-conscious you go to chipotle and so i was like holy crap like you know i don’t really want to get in the bakery business but this seems like a great opportunity and so i’ve been working on developing all these recipes and i’ve started um are you making like god you’re not money so yeah so i literally i’m literally starting a bakery it’s gonna be delivery only to start just as like a beta test and uh i’m calling it euphoria and uh you know the idea is basically you know tastes as good as a normal bakery but it’s actually really healthy for you and i’ve worn a glucose monitor i’ve done all these experiments what are you using i’m not doing levels i just use a dexcom but uh anyway i’m i’m beta testing it with a bunch of friends right now and then in a couple weeks i’m i’m launching it on doordash and going to experiment but it’s just like one of those random you know in like a business just like slaps you in the face yeah i want this for myself that’s so silly i can’t believe this is so this is very you this is it i find this to be i’m i’m very envious of you for doing this i think this is so freaking cool how much um did you employ this baker full-time or what are you doing with them you just contract i found someone who can work part-time and uh i’m just doing that to start it’s very like 80 20 i’m like how do i you know invest as little amount of money as possible and as little time as possible to do it so i hired a designer to do a logo on a simple website and then i hired a baker to do the baking and then a photographer did photograph everything and that’s it what’s your startup cost going to be uh five five or ten grand probably maybe a little more than that so again this is probably a nothing but it’s one of those things like at the very least no i just think it’s yeah it’s definitely gonna be a something i mean is it going to be like the thing who knows it’s definitely going to be a thing i mean like you i feel like you kind of you if you screw this up you’re kind of an idiot like yeah well it goes back to like if i just called it a paleo bakery even if it was unhealthy and shitty it would do well right and then you add on to that like that you know the all the glucose stuff and all the other stuff that’s getting hot right now i think it’s quite interesting to summarize i think this is such a great idea um i think it will be fun i think that it will make life worth like little stuff like this is life worth living but maybe it could be immensely profitable this is really smart i have a friend named david hauser who started grasshopper grasshopper i know him grasshopper a lot everyone knows dave he’s a good guy grasshopper was the software company that he sold i think for 200 million dollars entirely bootstrapped it was basically like a small business phone service you pay 10 or something a month and you get a phone line um he started this thing called nut butter is that what you know what’s it called uh it’s like a peanut butter pouch right like a peanut butter thing um and the business is so much harder than a software company but he’s having so much fun and it seems exciting um i think i think like there’s a it’s a double-edged sword right so um i i used to always i used to always ask people like you always get all these tech people who make tons of money or whatever and you’re like well you know what are you doing with your money like are you starting any weird things like you know i love dan gilbert which i talked about in the last episode um because he went how do i make my city better right it’s like doing the fun stuff with money and the way i look at this is like hey i’m scratching an itch for something i want my friends might want but i make my city better and it’s just a cool you know it’s a cool fun thing to play with right i think the fun part of entrepreneurship is going this should exist and making it exist um but at the same time like i’ve done stupid stuff like that like i started a pizza restaurant and i lost eight hundred thousand 000 doing it it was a total disaster i was getting phone calls like you know we had a we had like an alcoholic manager who was sleeping in the restaurant uh you know we had a sketchy landlord we had like just endless stress and [  ] and so this stuff is fun to appoint and the key that i’ve learned is just hiring amazing people so i only like the beginning like this part is fun but i gotta get out really quick have you heard of the barber uh motorsports museum and racetrack no so there’s this guy in alabama where is it uh somewhere in alabama let’s see it’s in um birmingham alabama but it’s in the country i think of birmingham alabama his name is george barber he’s probably 80 years old now his father this guy’s 80 and then his father started a dairy company so like farming dairy company just like imagine like an alabama dairy company that’s what it was sold it to dean foods for 500 million dollars or something like that and they were probably breaking it in throughout the entire 50-year pro period in which they owned he went with all the money he went and started this thing called the barber uh track and barber motorcycle and car museum and he has something like a thousand or two thousand cars i believe it’s the largest collection of motorcycles in the whole world and he has this world-class track where indy cars um um like rolex sponsored formula one uh races take place on this like people from all over europe monaco all come to birmingham alabama to start and go or to go to this uh barber race track it’s done so much for the community i think he invested probably 50 million dollars to make it because it’s a non-profit and you can look at how many assets they have and how much cash they have and what their revenue is and it’s amazing and it’s similar to your bakery thing now a lot of people like you think like oh how much can a car museum and a track help the community well it actually helps it a ton because people all every everyone go i’m going to go to barber soon and take this lesson yada yada and uh that’s my version of a of a of a bakery or saving detroit is i want to start like a car museum and a car track i think that’s what i was starting i was talking to a friend about this yesterday but um do you remember like 10 or 15 years ago portland was suddenly cool right everyone’s saying oh my god you got to go to portland or whatever the reason portland became cool was because of the ace hotel right the ace hotel was just kind of a funky hotel and it had a photo booth and a good bar in it and all this other stuff it was kind of new and i always think what’s the ace hotel that you can add to your own city right like in victoria it’s like what’s the thing that people come to see and right now it’s like uh you know some twee english shops and uh you know there’s a beautiful garden here and a few other you know historical things there’s nothing cool and so i’ve been thinking a lot about this like is it like a crazy bar or a music venue or a hotel or something like that but what’s the debt what makes this place the destination because i think something as simple as that can change an entire city um i don’t know what the answer is but that kind of stuff is really interesting to earlier you brought up henry singleton i like henry singleton i’ve read this really good book called the outsiders i know that’s probably your bible is that i love that book okay so the outsiders um it’s a great book it’s about 12 ceos who are quote outsiders the the commonalities is they’re like kind of quiet they’re kind of afraid of the press they are typically in locations like nebraska or [Music] somewhere not silicon valley or new york and they just get pretty good results but they get it every single year for like 50 years so they’ll like grow something by like 20 or 15 but they do it every year for so long that by year 20 30 40 it’s like oh my gosh they’re warren buffett they’re henry singleton yada yada who is this guy so yeah and the idea is basically that they’re capital allocators which is kind of a weird nerdy term but it basically just means they they’re really good at putting their money into buckets where they can make a lot more of it versus investing in the wrong thing and what a lot of people miss is you can have the most innovative ceo in the world but if they misallocate their dollars and they put it into you know low return r d versus high return acquisitions or whatever you can have a very bad result despite being very innovative and a great uh leader and manager um so henry singleton is like everyone thinks warren buffett’s the greatest investor of all time henry singleton um you know i think he died in the 80s but i’m pretty sure he actually has a better record than warren buffett and nobody really knows his name they only know it because of the outsiders there’s been one other book written about him but he basically got into these very niche very technical fields where they would do like um it’d be like navigation equipment that’s on like a you know a fighter jet or random little like diodes for for circuitry and all this kind of stuff but you’d find these niches where they could kind of own it or have a very dominant position in it what’s there’s this very simple um kind of way of thinking about investing and his whole thing was when the market is overvalued and crazy that’s a great time to issue stock and to sell things and when the market is undervalued you want to be buying not only buying back your own company so if you don’t own your entire company you want to go and you know buy back more stock and you want to be investing then and so that approach is you know it’s very simple it doesn’t sound like rocket science but i think it’s a really important thing for people to be thinking about right now and i think now is a great time to be scanning your portfolio or businesses and going how can i um how can i basically take advantage of valuations right now and either you know issue stock or use my stock in my business to go buy stuff or just wait for opportunities because right now it’s like a crazy seller’s market which is shockingly the hardest part is the not doing anything um so in time like you have far more perspective than this you’re uh more successful than i am and you’re a couple years older than i am so you just a little everything that i am interested in you are but more how are you and other people who you’ve met that that buy into this how do you guys just sit and chill uh how do you not do new stuff because i say to myself all the time i’m gonna i’m not gonna like pounce on x y and z i gotta wait i gotta wait i gotta wait i get so antsy and i can’t like it’s i it’s hard well there’s a reason i’m starting a sugar-free bakery right like this that’s the stuff that’s honestly my my secret to not doing too much is i distract myself um and you know before covet i’d be distracting myself with sports and you know playing uh bridge and hanging out with friends and going on walks and stuff now it’s starting businesses and they’re really small little businesses they’re like hobby businesses um you know it’s like um me just kind of playing with 10 or 20 000 but it’s enough to keep me distracted and happy and active and feel like i’m doing something but in reality i’m sitting on my hands and building up cash and what like you so you still have enough time to do that and do the we commerce thing which for those who don’t know andrew i don’t know how you describe it if you started it which you owned it i don’t know what the right terminology is but you have this thing that went public and is currently like i don’t know what it is today but like many hundreds of millions of dollars in market cap yeah we started a business about 10 years ago we met the founder of shopify and at the time we were running a design agency and he said hey we want to launch themes on our platform we want people to be able to sign up and have different designs they can choose from and we’ll let you guys sell these themes on the platform for you know 150 to 250 and so we were kind of thinking like hey it’s a small little canadian company these guys seem nice let’s do it and uh we started doing it and shopify just grew into a behemoth and we rode the whale and did really well and we actually sold the business in 2013. we didn’t realize how big shopify would get and then we bought the business back in 2019 um we did a bunch of back for more than you sold it way more yeah think it was five five times six times so we bought it back we we and we said like we you know we’re just making a big bet we think shopify is going to get a hell of a lot bigger and we made a holding company called we commerce and we started buying and kind of building a mini version of tiny um within the shopify ecosystem and then we took it public in december and we’re listed on the tsx venture exchange up in canada and uh as of right now i don’t know if this is in canadian dollars or american but it’s 663 million dollar market cap i think that’s yeah i think canadian that’s canadian so 600 663 canadian dollars so it’s pretty big how but i mean like you’re saying you’re like just sitting there not doing anything just waiting waiting waiting it seems like you’re doing something well i mean i’m we started this podcast by me saying i’m stressed out and busy right so i i i don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea that you know it’s more i’m filling my time when i have it by distracting myself with this other stuff and that all of the things i’m focused on right now for the most part like while i’m looking at buying businesses everything’s so overpriced that i don’t want to make a swing on the wrong thing so i’m filling the rest of my time with other things and one of those things is not email you told me the other day that you um for the first time ever which is actually shocking to me this first time ever you’ve hired someone or you’ve asked your assistant to completely manage your email and you said something like this is the first day i’ve tried it tbd if it actually works is it working and what are you doing yeah so i’m doing i’m doing two things that are kind of interesting so um one i fully delegated my email to my assistant so um i get i i’ve started getting over the last couple years like 200 or 300 emails a day and honestly it was just making me kind of miserable like it was just i’ve tried all the best practices and we even built a company called mailman that basically like slows down your email and and does do not disturb on it and stuff but it just wasn’t enough and i hit my breaking point a couple weeks ago i was just spending like five hours a day doing email and i set up tech support software i piped my email into it and i have my assistant and then we have another assistant we have in the philippines and they basically monitor the email and they have a set of rules so i wrote out like if someone asks me to sign a document send it to this person on our legal team they’ll review it and then if they say yes you can sign it as long as it’s below this amount um if someone requests an interview go and look at the podcast see how many vol downloads it gets and if it’s above this you can schedule it or whatever and so i made like 10 of these rules and now i’m getting like 20 emails a day because the only ones that come through to me are the ones where it’s a friend asking me a direct question or it’s one of our ceos or you know a go no go on an investment and so it just freed me up by like two or three hours and it’s a classic example of like the e-myth kind of where you’re like you know desperately doing all this stuff that you don’t really need to be doing because you’ve always done it um so that’s been awesome what’s up and then e i don’t know what the e-myth is oh you don’t know that book i’ve i i’ve seen it i i don’t know what the myth is i’ve never actually read it the e-myth the entrepreneur myth i think it is but um i think that’s the best i thought see i always thought it meant electronic like it no it’s it’s an amazingly badly written book but it’s a very important message it was like transformational for me like 12 years ago and the idea is basically um when people start businesses they don’t build systems and they don’t delegate right so uh the person who loves baking starts a bakery and then before they know it they’re staying up until two baking and then they wake up at seven in the morning to mop the floor and then they’re behind the tail all day they’re miserable they’re stressed and they thought they were creating this utopian business that they wanted and in reality it just sucks and they’re miserable and the reason it sucks and they’re miserable is because they don’t delegate they don’t build process they don’t hire people when they do hire people they don’t give them a chance and so it’s all about how to delegate got it okay and what were you saying about the email thing so and then the other thing i did um which has been really fun um i i used to like i used to do this myself so i used to cold email i still do it actually i still cold email entrepreneurs that i think are really cool and i want to meet or ask them questions and like five years ago i started getting emails from young entrepreneurs saying hey can you look at my startup or can you give me an opinion on this and i used to write really thoughtful responses and then as i got more email i just couldn’t respond and i felt really really guilty about this 100 i’d like to delete it sometimes i just like delete and other times i’d be like one line response and i’d be like [  ] they think i’m an [  ] 100 same dude i’ve done that with some people and then i’ve eventually become friends with them and you know how like on twitter you can see like you recognize people’s thumbnail over and over there’s this one guy the other day that i’ve seen him talk to me all the time and then i’ve been hanging out with this other person like through a friend of a friend like three different times now and i knew his name and i’m like [  ] you’re the guy i’ve been ignoring yeah i’m so sorry man i’m so sorry i i didn’t realize it so anyway i do the same thing and it kills me when you never know who they’re gonna become or they could have this great idea if you just talk to them and get on the phone and so um what i ended up doing i realized i was actually doing myself a disservice by responding because i just say like you know this is too long write me a shorter you know question or whatever it is you know the douchey like yeah i’m too busy stuff like that you know what you’re asking so now i write them back i have a template or my assistant writes them back and just says hey um i don’t respond to these via email what i like to do is i do an ama ask me anything every month and if you if you can afford to donate to charity um you know just as a way of you know paying it forward or whatever and so if someone’s rich if someone has a big company already i’m like hey go donate some money if they’re a first-time entrepreneur we don’t expect them to and then chris and i just do a monthly ama and then everyone gets to enjoy the answer we do so it’s dude so it’s been crazy so we we’ve already donated 58 000 to charity from this so we basically whatever the community donates we double it and then we donate it to a local charity so for we’ve donated 58k half of which came from people who donated and then uh it’s probably saved me two or three hours a month i’m just not responding to these emails so it’s like a really great hack should i copy that i think that’s great totally yeah did you make that up uh yeah i think we made it up that’s wonderful that is such a good idea where did you send the 56k to have you picked your thing yeah we did one one was like a uh it’s called bridges for women i think i think it was um and it’s for women that are transitioning out of abusive households and then the other one was a gym a local gym some guys set up a gym for uh handicapped people because there’s no equipment for handicapped people in town and so it’s somewhere you can go and work out if you’re you know uh paraplegic or something what’s the most amount of money you’ve ever donated or given can you reveal that uh i i’ve given away probably like three or four million bucks i think so wow that’s crazy isn’t it it’s really um it’s it’s really crazy and i’m just kind of learning i’m learning i’m going like how what’s the most effective thing to do because there’s everything from like local feel good right where you can help a small number of people but you know you’re making their life 10 better but you’re not saving a life versus if you put the money into like malaria medication or bed nets or that sort of thing in the third world um you know i think that’s what i’m kind of debating right now is how to how to be most effective with my altruism i can’t believe though like you’ve given away that much money that’s a huge amount i’ve like i haven’t done really much of anything um and i want to um the way i started was i um i just started doing um donating to science so i’d be like as i was researching different medical things i’d be like oh this researcher is really cool i’m going to start donating monthly and i just fund their work and then over time i just put more and more into it um and then you know over the last year i started the tiny foundation if you’ve seen that but about a year ago i started doing this thing where i would just find people who i thought were smart in fields that i thought were important and i’d say here’s a hundred to three hundred thousand dollars you choose where it goes so you donate it it can go to your own research it can go to a friend’s anything you think is important and it just saves me from having to do all the diligence and work so i’m looking at it now even your foundation website looks pretty badass which is awesome yeah we hired some really awesome designers for that yeah it looks really good so for this um wow besides just like doing good uh which is like the most important thing but let’s just be real is there anything that you’re getting out of this um i mean what i get out of it is other than feeling good well for example so i don’t i don’t think i’ve talked about on here but um i had acid reflux like horrible acid reflux for eight years and uh i started researching it and i read tons of research about it and i was like holy crap if you get esophageal cancer you die like there’s literally no treatment and so i actually one of the things i’m funding is a esophageal cancer research center at ubc and is you know so you could argue maybe i’m trying to save myself in the future maybe if i get this um but other than that it’s a great way to meet interesting people as well right like i’ve met all sorts of amazing researchers and um doctors and all sorts of other stuff as a result but no i mean it’s just i’m trying to figure out how to convert money into something other than more and more you know more problems um last topic something i want to ask you about i don’t i think it was a friend i forget who nick or my friend nick ray or i don’t know who i forget who said something about how one time you a charity dinner or charity lunch with uh ackman bill ackman um and at the time everyone like made fun of you like who’s this idiot from canada that would spend 50 000 on a lunch i mean they don’t realize that that money actually goes to a charity as well but they’re like oh my gosh like this is so stupid yada yada yada turns out you actually became friends bill i think uh i don’t know him but i’m gonna call him bill like i do and you guys have like done business together and i’m sure you’ve made that money back many times over but you have this interesting way of networking you have this interesting way of getting your foot in the door one time on this podcast you told a story about warren buffett you’ve told you’ve told me uh a couple people that you’ve been hanging out with like in like you’ve had you’re like oh my gosh i just did a zoom with x y and z and they’re like pretty big deal people what is your whole thing about networking i mean you’re just talking about cold emailing what what you have this weird philosophy about this yeah so i’m gonna first to start with i think networking is really fun if you’re an extrovert and i’m an extreme extrovert right so when i feel depressed or sad i want to be around people i want to share my problems i want to connect with people right so so i by default do this um and i would say like starting about 15 years ago um i just started i started seeing all these interesting people on the internet and going wow they seem amazing like i want to do business with them i want to become friends with them and specifically there’s all these people in new york who are big tumblr users who just seem super cool you know the founders of collegehumor and vimeo and all those people and so i started uh i started doing a couple things one of them was i never eat alone so pre-covered i’d always have lunch with somebody usually locally and i’d almost always do at least one call with a random person who i either haven’t met or i’m just building a relationship with even if it’s like 30 minutes first thing in the morning the other thing i did is i started paying to be in the right room so i remember telling someone 10 years ago i wasn’t doing super well right i maybe was doing 15 20k a month of revenue uh or something like that and i paid 10 000 to go to the ted conference and all my friends were like what the hell are you thinking you’re spending all this money on this when i went to the te i have this whole thing about paying to be in the right room right so um when you go to ted it’s like a secret club if you get into ted every single person that’s there is someone interesting um and at the very least they’ve paid a lot of money to be there so they’re legit and being in the room if you’re in the room everyone goes oh they’re legit too and so i was this like twerp with this tiny little business and i’m talking to al gore and the founders of google and you know all these amazing people and just being in a room with those people you naturally over the course of going consistently for years you end up meeting all these amazing people and making connections you end up doing business with them and so my doing that just going to ted probably spending 30k on on tickets for three years i think it ended up resulting in 10 or 20 million dollars of revenue for my various businesses and so i’m a big fan of doing that the other thing i like to do is host events so i try and bring someone really interesting to town in victoria and then i invite a whole bunch of other people who i think are interesting and then by doing that you know you’ve you’ve basically made this collection of people where you’re the host and you know you’re kind of in charge of of the whole group and you get to meet the speaker and other stuff and so an example of that is i thought uh shane parish from farnam street was super interesting and brought him out to do a speaking event brought out all my favorite people from victoria and elsewhere and i ended up becoming friends with shane and now shane is an investor with us and we’ve done a whole bunch of deals and he’s a good friend and so um i think like one of the uh one of the there’s just one of the things no one recognizes is there’s an insane amount of optionality and upside and just knowing great people both personally you know you make great friends but when you have a problem or you want to build a business or you need being able to call a bunch of amazing people is the ultimate hack and so yeah that same thing happened with bill i went into that charity lunch you know actually looking at it as like a kind of a diligence thing i had invested in his uh his company and i was going well if i don’t like him i’ll sell it and if i hold on hey yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i don’t know if he had you invested i had like five million dollars five million dollars invested in his uh holding company pershing square holdings personally yeah yeah and i don’t do like a tough guy i mean he’s not he’s not a tech guy like what i had no i honestly didn’t really think of it as like oh this is super strategic he’s a really smart investor this was in 2017 i think or 2016. and how many that was a four or five that was five years ago so you were like what 31 yeah 31 or so um uh 5 million no matter what is a lot of money but at 31 that must have been a significant amount of your of your wealth um it is my largest investment outside of the tech businesses and you put it all in that in his fund well i saw it was basically bill bill had a series of um challenging investments and so his stock traded way down and when i looked at it i was like okay i can buy a dollar of amazing stock so so it’s really simple it’s a holding company that owned about 10 stocks and if you looked at the stocks it was like lowe’s howard hughes corp which is like a real estate business chipotle like really good blue chip businesses and for every dollar of stock that was sitting in the holding company you could buy it for 65 cents because the stock had traded down so much so it was like buying a dollar for 65 cents so i didn’t necessarily think bill was a you know genius i thought he was a very smart investor i just thought it was a very cheap stock and so i bought it and then when i saw this charity lunch come up i was like oh sweet i can like grill this guy and see if i like him and the upside is uh 57 grand and the upside is he’s just a really smart investor and maybe i can learn something from him but he doesn’t invest in tech or at least i didn’t know he did so i had no like i didn’t think i’d be doing business with them it was like a pinch me moment when you know we ended up investing in stuff together um what happened to the the stock uh it went up a lot uh it went up it doubled or more tripled or something since i bought it so it’s it’s done really well it’s it’s tripled so the 5 million went to 15 in a matter of six years yeah i i think i think i actually it might have been 2018 it’s either 2017 or 2018 i had lunch over the last over the last few few years it traded way up he’s done he’s done amazingly well i don’t know if you saw i think you guys talked about it on the pod but he had a bet where he invested 25 million and it turned into 2.7 billion and that was in that that that holding company that i’m an investor in oh my gosh that is so funny um um so back to the networking i got distracted the pay the payoff is that’s so cool i mean obviously for business it’s great you surround i i really believe you’re you’re the sum of the five or ten of you know best friends or most interesting people around you so i think it influences you really positively um but the cool thing that that’s happened is now it compounds so now i don’t actually do cold emails very often i don’t really like consciously network i just naturally every week or two i get introduced to someone really interesting and so now it’s this like i planted the garden and now i’m enjoying the fruits from it my issue is i don’t really want to talk to people like that much uh like you and i text message um and i’m okay with text like i’ll text like there’s like 10 people who i’ll text uh you’re one of them it’s like other than that like i really don’t want to talk to anyone and it kind of actually stresses me out because i don’t it doesn’t trust me out because in one regard it doesn’t trust me because i don’t want to talk to people like i i really only want like a small group and i only want to be with them um and like you’re you’re one of those people we’re all well i’ll just text you and be like hey do you see the new 911 get released or like we just [ __ ] right we don’t we don’t talk about work we just talk about uh just bought this car does this is this check out this video listen to it it’s cool um but then i feel left out because i’m like i’m like sean does this a lot sean networks with everyone and he gets access to all this cool stuff and i’m like i want that access but i don’t want to spend the time talking to these people because i just get nervous or you have the ultimate you have the ultimate hack though which is you you have this platform right i’ve started realizing this too there’s a reason i come on i have a lot of fun talking to you guys but at the same time there’s 10 000 people listening and a whole bunch of them are super fascinating and they’re going to email both of us and say hey dude i’d love to do something with you or whatever so we just bypassed you know 10 the problem with networking is you do five boring calls and then one amazing one right so you’re constantly talking to people you don’t necessarily want to talk to where they don’t turn out to be that interesting when you think they will be um but it’s worth it because there’s a diamond in the rough and i think podcasting is interesting because it lets you you basically have like 10 000 people who kind of learn what you’re about and they can either decide if they like you or not and if they opt in and they like you you’ve already pre you’ve pre-like sold them almost right like when i get on the phone with someone fresh i actually tell a story about like this is how i started and this is my company and this is what we do and it’s all kind of it’s not a sales pitch but it’s really like hey here’s who i am and you can just bypass all of that via podcast or something yeah i i hear you and i what i usually when i talk to people i’ll be like i’ll be like hey i don’t want to be pretentious or anything but like do you know who i am um yeah because like i can save us time and i won’t like do the spiel uh they’re like oh i listen to the podcast i’m like sick i’m not gonna tell you anything what’s going on how are you um the other day i had this guy named michael loeb do you know who michael loeb is yeah he um he has an incubator like a big big incubator his house is the house in billions the hamptons house yeah so i like this guy i don’t know him other than the few minutes that i just talked to him but i knew about him and i actually admire what i read about him he started this thing called synapse i think which he sold to meredith some or time magazine for uh 800 million dollars then with that money he started priceline uh he started with this guy named jay walker and i think they sold that for billions of dollars and i think it was the fastest time anyone has ever made a billion dollars like from launch to like the sale or the the public markets it was like uh like a year or something like stupidly crazy he got made all of his money there bought this huge house in the hamptons which if you watch the tv show billions axelrod bobby axelrod buys this house for like a hundred million dollars like something crazy and it’s like the whole point is it’s supposed to be like the the representation of greed and and too much money and that’s the house that he buys well that’s michael loeb’s house and a couple years ago he there was this party or a charity actually a charity event and they raised like 350 000 for this event but one of his sons uh has a friend over who gets drunk and says something smart to him so michael punches him in the face and gets arrested so he’s got this if you google michael loeb arrested you’ll see his mug shot he’s got like a white t-shirt on like they could clearly like pulled him out of bed so anyway and they found out that you know michael loeb is like this rich guy so the dad of the son probably sued him yada yada yada well anyway he heard he didn’t but one of his assistants someone must make a list of every young entrepreneur who sold the company and they send you this email from michael and it’s like hey i’m michael loeb i’m such a fan um and i know this guy’s like 60 something years old i’m like i don’t think this is you but that’s cool like it’s your assistant and he goes hey um let’s talk so i talked to him and i could tell he doesn’t know who i am and it’s it’s no big deal he wasn’t he it wasn’t like a disrespect or anything but uh i was honored that he even reached out or his people did and he’s like so i’m thinking about hosting this event for entrepreneurs are are you interested in coming i’m like dude i’m not going to be pretentious here i’m sorry if i come off that way but like you’re talking to like the guy uh i host these things called hustle con i do this i got this podcast thing i’ve got this email thing like i’ve got your target demographic and he goes yeah well like i’m wanting to host an event at my house have you seen have you heard of my house like yeah i’ve heard of your house obviously i’ve heard of your house it’s like the house and i’m trying to convince him now to make me a co-host and i don’t think he’s gonna make me a co-host but i hope he’ll invite me to come to his house in the hamptons where he wants to have like 50 or 100 young entrepreneurs and i have a feeling what this guy does is he owns this thing called loeb enterprises and i think he owns 100 of it and it’s very much like tiny where they invest a small sum of money into interesting ideas and they’ll co-own the business with the entrepreneur starting it um or they’ll own it wholly and give the entrepreneur a salary and they build up these companies and then they eventually sell them and they’ve had some great success they built up i think this thing called script relief uh did a hundred million a year in profit um they built up a bunch of interesting things but related to networking that’s my networking story and maybe i’ll be hanging out with michael loeb and whoever he hangs out with i don’t know who he hangs out so i want to invite to that event that sounds awesome we got we got introduced to him when we were in new york last time so chris and i go to his office and uh he’s like an old school almost like almost like a car salesman right like we sit down and he’s like hi guys i’m michael loeb and uh he pulls out a slide deck but it’s not on a screen it’s literally a printed slide deck and he this is goes story he has no idea who i am he just like goes through this slide deck and he starts going line by line about it and uh i i i i thought it was really charming and he seemed like a cool guy but it was crazy like he definitely has like a shtick and he has like a system for this stuff um it was really interesting because his house is like crazy right like i haven’t been to it but i’ve seen photos and you know watched around billions you go to his office and you’re like oh it’s just like a new york office right random office it’s like chaos there’s you know weird desks everywhere and like shitty chairs and disgusting it’s funny like seeing um you know these in new york you can be the richest person in the world but it’s like you still have to ride the subway you’re still you still you still have a cramped office all this other stuff it’s funny yes i saw he videoed me and i could see in his office and it looked like uh all of his employees were at home except for his crew and he clearly had like this very stereotypical like i didn’t actually see this woman but this is like i could kind of tell that this person was in the background this very typical 50 year old secretary who’s had for like 30 years who like i can just imagine her with her flats and like dress on handing him coffee and like she’s this nice lady i just like everything about him fit this stereotype and frankly i loved it i think this guy is incredibly uh is loeb enterprises is that i think they’re really legit they’ve created a couple really interesting things yeah i mean it’s very legit and it’s one of those things where you you go in and he’s like oh we’ve got you know this company and this company and this company and you know one of them sends wine direct you know direct mail wine and the other one does like receipts and you take a photo of your receipt and send it and you’re kind of going like i don’t know what the bs is versus what the big businesses are like they throw a lot of spaghetti against the wall and they incubate a lot of businesses and like you said they have an amazing track record of making some of these big um but uh but yeah he’s he’s a total character yes that guy is crazy interesting i’m so happy i got to talk to that guy um i i have another meeting with us folks um um and i’m looking forward to talking to him and if i host that dinner or even if i get to attend the dinner and he lets me invite people i’m gonna invite you because um inviting you and a few other people that’s like maybe that’s like how i’m gonna look legit to this person um super fascinating i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to travel never looking back