Transcript
Raw auto-generated captions — not yet polished.
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en [Music] all right we are live uh what’s going on man how are you what’s going on gentlemen so we have patrick campbell well the company was profitwell yeah but originally it was it was something else for first right yeah we called it price intelligently so we did a little piece of pricing software morphed into pricing software and service a lot of service actually and then started building this metrics tool and all that kind of fun stuff and then recently sold the paddle which is a payments infrastructure product and the headline the headline price was 200 million dollars and you bootstrapped the company and i think in a tweet you said you owned i don’t know if it was you and your co-founder or company owned but like you guys owned almost all of it right yeah we were bootstrapped so we owned 100 of it um and so we uh yeah but we were pretty generous i think i tweeted about the fact that we’re pretty generous about giving out equity so it wasn’t like i had 100 um we had i think the headline number is we had 13 millionaires we had like 30 35 people made 6ks or more and then i think there’s like 120 people all in people who had worked at the company previously in the current employees who got some sort of consideration out of the deal so i think it was true it was over 200 it was over 200 technically like we’re not public i don’t know it’s so weird about these numbers it’s like what are you public with what are you not and i have a board and a boss now so i have to have to be a little careful not that careful but a little careful about all the things i say you do you do seem like you’re cultivating that trillionaire energy that we like to seize i gotta say i’m getting the vibe i’m getting that i’m getting that extreme satisfaction and relief vibe that comes when you sell a company well sean ask him how tightly wound i am so yeah that’s interesting ask him where he just moved to go ahead tell them where did you just move to uh i moved to puerto rico for all the obvious reasons just put it out there just to be very clear uh very obvious reasons why i moved here and it’s 80 and i’m not a huge fan of the heat but uh i am like basically recording with a 6k camera right now and that’s that’s that trillionaire energy where it’s like where do you put the money i don’t like cars so i got a really cool like dope set up basically i mean that bookshelf needs a little upgrade too if i must be honest here i feel like this was literally like ikea i don’t have anything behind me like let’s throw some books up and kind of go from there so we’ll we’ll get there we’ll get there so what what exactly did you guys i i we used you i believe but i think we got i think we used you for free and i was like how did these guys make money what exactly did did you guys do yeah so the the headline kind of positioning is we we basically exist to run and grow subscription businesses automatically and the automatically thing was the thing that like really worked well for us um and what i mean by that is like in the perfect vision world you should be able to plug in profit well to any subscription business so into stripe charge be zora whatever you’re using for your billing and then automatically like you get all of your metrics for free which is probably what you’re referencing and then um we reduce your churn your cancellations automatically optimize your pricing automatically and now with the whole paddle deal we like take care of your taxes automatically chargebacks all that kind of fun stuff and so yeah i think the the the big thing for us was when we were this pricing service um we wanted to get to something that was more pure software and we were helping a company with their pricing that was about to ipo and we actually discovered they were calculating mrr and churn completely wrong which was really fascinating um and so we kind of put those two insights together and then started producing this metrics product so you get all of your financial reporting if you’re a subscription or sas company and then there were like 30 competitors and it was like all overnight like the space where we thought we were going to be billionaires for like metrics all of a sudden it was like oh my god like everyone and their mother is building a stripe integration and so um we did some homework we did some research all that kind of fun stuff and basically discovered that like either this is a terrible business and we should stop doing it because no one is really great at monetizing metrics or the free route which is what we did and um i think that’s probably when we should have raised money like in in hindsight but long story short that’s what grew and we had at the end well it’s still going but we had 30 000 companies using profitwell um basically when we sold and that number is just kind of going up every single day which is great and when you you reached out to us and you were like hey i think you do you listen to the pod is that kind of why you reached out of course yeah absolutely i’m glad to hang out with the 12 year olds from a recent episode i learned yeah you said something which kind of tipped me off you were like i grew up in wisconsin doing hood rat [ ] hat tip to sam i was like oh okay he knows jokes he knows about sometimes you just want to do hood ratchet of course that’s why we’re getting a ranch built in utah right now everything’s gonna be great like that’s that’s that’s the hood wrap world there are are you really you’re building a ranch in utah yeah that’s the goal so i grew up in wisconsin right so i grew up like literally milking cows as a kid and like you know kind of having the let’s say the sampar lifestyle like my dad has no idea what i do he’s like just confused he thinks i’m being a tax evader moving to puerto rico like all that kind of fun blue collar sam he’s like he was just more rich yeah yeah what’d you say sean that’s funny yeah yeah he’s like you’re just more rich it looks like it that’s what it i do what i can s think the difference is that sam’s living a little like i’m like all in like just still like nose to the grindstone but yeah i grew up in wisconsin and then after school i moved to dc i worked in us intelligence and then worked in tech in boston and that’s kind of when i got into the to the business space basically but what i was gonna say is you reached out intelligently because we get a bunch of people who are like hey would love to come on and tell my story it’s like yeah i’m sure you would who wouldn’t want to come on and tell their story like i also like to get you know free fame but the the thing you did was you sent us like i don’t know six or seven bullet points you’re like uh here’s you know here’s some stuff i can talk about and then you sent us i would say like five or six really interesting things so i kind of want to hop around on those um sam did you have a favorite one that you liked from these uh okay well let’s so do you have it in front of you it’s hidden industries i got in front of it so okay so yeah that’s the juicy that’s the juicy one so basically you said i think we have the largest subscription financial database in the world right like you you guys have 100 20 30 billion dollars of annual recurring revenue flowing through your system which is just a bunch of data that will tell you i bet you there’s some things that are like huh no way they make that much right there’s like some surprising niches that that make a lot of money and then there’s maybe some trends or benchmarks so take it where you want it but i think that’s one that’s going to be super interesting for i know i want to know i don’t know the answer so i know people listening will too yeah totally so there’s there’s there’s a couple things so one like just to give an example like um we we would always like so we study the data in aggregate that’s what helps like train our algorithms for like churn reduction and all that kind of fun stuff but then the other really interesting thing is like we publish a lot of content on this so a lot of sas companies it’s like oh what should our churn be what should this look like so we publish a lot of that the other thing that got really interesting was we would basically be kind of like a hidden like helper for deal flow for a lot of vcs and we would never like reveal someone’s like particular numbers of course not but like what was really fascinating is when kind of the the jungle scout amazon you know kind of play was happening like we would all of a sudden have like all of these apps just break our qa scripts because every time like someone was growing too fast we would go oh something must be broken with the metrics right right so that’s a little bit of context um there’s like three or four really fascinating industries especially going into a recession that i think are really good for like people who want to fast move into them one one of these industries that’s kind of crazy to talk about quilting and crafts quilting and crafts subscription companies are like growing insane um what’s fascinating is the quilting space if the if you didn’t know quilting is um it’s about a four and a half billion dollar per year industry um the average quilter spends about eight to nine thousand dollars per year on like quilting supplies um most of that comes not just online but it comes through quilt shops so there’s a really interesting local play that we’ve seen some of these companies um use and some of the more popular apps quilting just means like making a blanket that has like designs on it right uh for the most part um now as a mom a midwest mom who does hardcore quilting like there’s a lot of other stuff like our house we didn’t have pictures up we had quilts that were hung right of like different designs and all kinds of stuff but yeah every major milestone in my life i got a quilt like i have six quilts in puerto rico that are useless to me just given how like warm it is here there’s there’s paint i see went to someone else’s house they had a painting on the wall it’s like no no you don’t need that just put a blanket on the wall yeah yeah it’s great sound deadening it’s really good sound ending but yeah it’s really interesting because like that market has gone wild like even like knitting like crafts that type of stuff and what’s really interesting about it is like especially in the subscription space there’s a lot of these built-in type projects that these companies have started taking advantage of so there’s this thing called block of the month club that has been around since quilters have existed you create a block of a quilt every single you know month basically and it’s like a community type thing um so there’s something there quilt retreats are a huge thing like quilt retreats like i didn’t know about that like all of these mostly like middle aged or older women coming together like hanging out and staying up all night talking and like you know quilting so that’s one space the craft space knitting all that kind of stuff is really interesting another one that’s interesting is uh basically old people uh but before you move on before sam yeah do you know stuff about quilting i feel like you know we have knowledge about this stuff no i i don’t but i’m looking at i just googled block of the month club so that that’s like a that’s like a genre of clubs that’s not like the name of a of a club right and i just i’m just looking at yeah or i don’t know a style and i’m looking up what what these are what these are and i’m looking at the businesses it wouldn’t shock me if some of these are doing nine figures so 100 million dollars plus in subscription revenue based off there’s some other traffic like there’s craftsy there’s annie’s kit clubs.com do you know anything about these yeah yeah so there’s there’s there are definitely nine figure companies in the space i’ll put it that way and then nine figures a year so 100 million plus in subscription revenue for sell and they basically like i don’t know what differentiates all them i’m just clicking on the ads but they just sell like they send you a block you know what a block is sean like just one square patch of the quilt a square patch and during the holidays this is making my dreams come true right now just this whole like learning you guys right now people think that i i am midwestern i grew up in like an urban environment so i grew up in like the city so we didn’t we weren’t exactly quilting but we basically what they do is they they send you a patch like a like a block like a six inch by six inch block and it looks like it’s like got like pumpkins and a snowman on it and that’s like the holiday version of what do you do with that you stitch that into the other blocks that you’ve been getting yeah so basically here’s here’s how quilt gets made i can’t believe i’m about to explain this so a quilt gets made by these blocks now sometimes it’s just designs sometimes it’s got stuff on it like snowmen and stuff like that so you create these blocks you build a top so let’s say you want like a king-sized bed it’s just the top so it’s just one layer of fabric what you do is you take it to a quilt shop and then you go to the quilt shop and that quilt shop is going to charge you per inch to put a back and then a batting which is like the stuff that makes it kind of a blanket and then they like put a design in there as they like put those layers together and then you have a quilt um right and then some hardcore moms like my mom has her own basically quilting machine it’s like an eight-foot machine to basically make all of these quilts out so yeah it’s and this is the thing your mom’s a bad 99 of them are on like facebook they’re all like they’re really targetable which is really fascinating and like the youtube content that’s come out of like the quilt community is pretty wild as well and um yeah there’s there’s this one in missouri i can’t remember exactly but it was like this town that was like basically you know on its last legs this woman her you know basically her son started doing youtube videos where she would just explain how to do quilting stuff it’s created it basically revitalized the town like because everyone comes on buses to come visit the town and go to the quilt shop and all that kind of fun stuff and um the quilt shows quilt and craft shows are pretty fascinating this is all my childhood coming out because i got dragged to use bookstores and quilt shops basically and the quilt shows are wild like they’ll just be famous quilters on stage with a camera like doing quilt stuff like basically which is just kind of a fascinating world and it’s a lot of money in it that’s like kind of like old school meaning like there’s a couple of really big players that kind of sell everything and there’s all these new school folks coming in and kind of lopping off different segments that i would look at uh so the one i was describing uh these moms while you’re looking at that up these moms these quilters are not using instagram a lot it looks like i’m like looking up quilting on instagram and facebook groups real heavy there’s not a ton of pages on instagram that are doing quilting but it’s like an opportunity by the way uh to like build big quilting pages on instagram they are facebook groups they’re the facebook group i’ve seen everyone just researching while i’m here i’m looking at tons of highly engaged quilting facebook groups well it’s also interesting like you’ll even in boston like there’ll be these little like meetups so the younger community they’re kind of going through um knitting into like quilting because it’s like oh you get to build something the designs are a lot more modern all that kind of fun stuff but yeah it’s an interesting interesting world a missouri star quilt company is the one that i was referencing the youtube kind of kind of world how big is that uh i don’t know their revenue individually i don’t think they have a subscription sean have you heard of hallmark you know hallmark cards of course so neighbor used to own like 50 hallmark stores really i was like how’s these how are these people so rich and they’re like oh now they own like 100 hallmarks so hallmark is an interesting company related to this and i’m everything i’m saying is is off the top of my off memory so i may be wrong but they hallmark is a privately owned business it’s owned by a family and i think it’s one of the largest privately owned companies in the world in america and they do five billion dollars a year in revenue and i think that they make money in two ways they uh have these stores that are franchises and they just sell cards so hallmark just sells cards and then the other thing that’s kind of weird is they owned hallmark media which is a hallmark tv station channel yeah yeah where they make like it’s a joke it’s like a genre hallmark movies which is like sappy movies that moms like but i wouldn’t be surprised if they own like if if they’re just like uh you know behind the scenes in the quilting game just calling the shots you know what i mean they’re deep in the underground quilt game yeah [Laughter] some of the big originals they’re huge this this hobby i think has legs for a couple reasons one is it has a bunch of factors that individually are strong characters of like you know potentially good businesses but when you stack them it becomes even more valuable so it’s like this is a stacking of trends so you have the trend of diy and crafts at home right then you have the trend of oddly satisfying which is you’ve seen these videos of people cutting sand or like asmr stuff like this which is like there’s a therapeutic benefit to doing these things tac like these repetitive tedious clean straight lines you know stuff with your hands that you can do that has like a tactile feel to it then you add on community and it’s like oh yeah people get together and they do this together okay so now this is an excuse it’s like you know guys getting together to play poker or something like that it’s like yeah yeah we don’t all really you know we’re not trying to be the best poker player but it’s just an excuse to sit around and [ ] and so you start stacking these on top of each other then it’s like nostalgia because people are making quilts out of like their kids clothes and stuff like that because you know they don’t want you what else yeah what do i do with these old stuff and then all it becomes this like this like memory in this heirloom and i’m like you know i have a blanket that my grandma made before she passed away and it’s like that means something to our family because she made it right it’s like a memory of her so you stack all these things on top of each other and now you have this like you know sort of like this uh you know long island iced tea of a business where you stacked all these different you know things into one cocktail and it’s it’s just a strong you know son of a [ ] additionally i think uh maybe you could kind of tell me if this is true or not but from my experience most people in silicon valley and young people they’re like we’re going to make this app or this widget for like millennials or gen z in reality every business that i know of personally that or the majority of my friends who own businesses that sell stuff to women in middle america between the ages of 30 and 60 hands down has the highest loyalty and engagement and lowest amount of churn is that accurate other than businesses i’m a group of consumers yeah so normally if you’re selling to normally older audiences from a consumer perspective retain at a higher rate um mainly because of the implications that you’re already alluding to um it’s they’re less finicky like they’re harder to convert sometimes because of that loyalty but once they’re in they’ve like made a decision and then they’re they’re sticking it out for quite some time um and this is kind of like as a lesson like i can tell you anytime there is a more premium product or a more niche audience you just have better churn like every single time so like butcher box started with the you know whole kind of paleo crowd a very niche it was very premium in terms of price point worked out really well whoops started very high they were like we’re athletes and then all these people who were like i want to be an athlete too and they’re charging 30 bucks a month right um that’s always what i recommend is if you’re starting something especially if you’re bootstrapping um start high and then come down it’s a lot easier um than it is to like start really cheap and then go back up unless you’re running a freemium model which is a very different model to run sean have you ever been doing have you been doing applebee’s lately oh hell yeah chili’s and applebee’s baby have you really been doing applebees yes i have that’s hilarious um so do you know how their whole shtick is like even though it’s a chain it like they they put like the neighborhood baseball team on the wall which who knows if it’s they’re actually from that neighborhood like you know whenever you go there they make it feel like that well i had a friend that worked on the advertising part of of applebee’s and one time we had to go there and like order everything on the menu and drink and eat it all it was horrible but i was like tony this food is like quite bad like this is horrible i don’t like i don’t i don’t think you’re gonna be able to be able to make this cool like you know you’re telling me like a it was like a nuclear green like limeade like i was like dude this is horrible i don’t want to drink this [ ] this is awful or like one time why does the cheese taste like beans and the beans taste like cheese let’s go yeah well they they sent over something i’m like i don’t know what this is and so we dipped it in there and it was icing uh like it was like a side of icing and i was like dude this is horrible why do people like this he’s like well it’s mostly middle america and they call i believe that they called their ideal customer a jim bob which is someone who is in their 50s 60s and 70s and has a little bit of money but wants to continue going there because it feels like it’s the last like hoorah for the neighborhood and they’re supporting their neighborhood and they’re willing to put up with the crappy food because it somehow feels like their way of life is under attack and this is like the last like thing that represents their neighborhood even though it’s some huge national yeah the world is changing so much and this is all this is the one staple that like you walk in and it feels exactly the same as it did when you were 14 what yeah are we gonna say i literally wrote this last night so i’m reading a slack message last night 12 35 a.m so right after midnight i just slacked this to myself i i wrote if you’re selling a cool thing to a cool person you’re playing the game wrong that is hard mode and this is all of you know you meet most people in d2c most people in silicon valley it’s like they’re they are in their 20s they’re cool and new in the world and they’re selling to cool and new people in la and new york and san francisco and they’re like yeah of course like you know i’m gonna create this new cool thing and i’m gonna sell it to new cool people and what you wanna do is you wanna sell simple things to simple people and so um and i had a buddy tell me this with um a project i was working on he goes he goes okay so what’s your main like sales channel i was like oh facebook ads he goes okay so that means your customer at scale is an overweight overworked mom in texas and he’s like so i look at your website and i don’t see anything that like appeals to her uh like it doesn’t have to look like her at least to look like how she wants to look and um and it basically was like you know if you can’t sell to an overweight overworked mom in texas like you can’t scale and i was like what the hell like okay okay you don’t even know any overweight overworked moms in texas do you i used to live in houston that turned out to be a valuable it’s just like you were saying like you know my mom used to drag me probably kicking and screaming to these quilting shows and now that you’re an entrepreneur you’re like ooh quilting niche tell me more right like it’s like we flip you know the thing we used to resist now we we you know want to want to go go for it and so it’s the same thing like growing up in texas that’s like man i just thought everything cool was in new york and san francisco and la and i just wanted to go there and now that i’m here i’m like dude i don’t want to sell to these like fickle millennials who are like you know you know trying to do like berry detoxes like i want to sell you know something to a mom in texas because if i can do that that’s a license to print money and like if you go look at you know the best-selling car the last i don’t know 30 years is the ford f-150 it’s a you know it’s a pickup truck that sells for for 36 thousand dollars you go around san francisco you won’t see one you know you would think the best-selling car in america is the tesla model x you know and it’s like that’s just not the case uh because you’re in you’re in a bubble and so you know and i think the jim bob you know overweight mom in texas the you know the other one is you know the enterprise sales one is like you know you’re selling to bob the mid-level manager or the senior manager who’s you know got a little bit of a belly and he’s losing his hair like that’s who you’re selling to and you gotta like can you nail that sale because if you can you could build a very very big business and i mean that like the most loving way possible which is basically just saying to most entrepreneurs and most kind of young people like get out of your bubble well you end up not chasing fads like there’s a lot of fads like business builds on built on fads right and and those are great businesses right like we hear about them all the time the guy who what was it the um the teeth like i can’t remember like the the hillbilly teeth you remember this at gas stations like apparently like 20 million like business right like the snuggie huge fad you know hundreds of millions of dollars i believe in revenue but like something like quilting has been around forever it’s not sexy right but the targeting gets really interesting and like some of the other things right like you guys talk about this a lot where it’s like services business you know lawn care hvac all these other things end up being like stuff that sticks around for a long time and you know through the businesses that you don’t really hear of and there’s a lot of opportunity in terms of roll up or like flipping the model that you know was basically being used by the folks that are the incumbents so what are some of these other if you’re if you’re going to innovate innovate on just one thing so it’s like oh quilting people love but there’s not a lot of instagram theme pages and communities on instagram okay that’s like it’s just like i can do one new thing on top of nine old time you know uh nine things that are still gonna be the same and that’s like a new thing right sam did the news but he did it through email instead of through you know printed papers right and so like one new thing and then he didn’t need to change everything else everything else could stay the same because the human needs stayed the same oh yeah sorry we went a long ass time on quilting but talking about quilting baby that’s great yeah what else do you got what are some other kind of niches three other spaces have to go deeper uh trades roll-ups plumbing companies hvac companies electrician companies there’s a lot of that stuff happening it’s not like machine shops or those types of things where it’s just like hard to innovate it’s like skilled enough that there’s a niche and there’s like a moat but it’s not skilled enough that you can’t roll it up a lot of these guys and gals are looking for basically a way to retire and it’s kind of like accountant you know shops like they don’t get more than one x max right in terms of their business um basically things to sell to kids of old people that’s the best way to look what is that what does that mean i don’t know i saw you wrote that products that prey on baby boomer kid guilt yeah yeah so a really good example um it’s not a huge company because it’s a one-man shop out of boston is nanograms it’s basically a um i don’t know if you email or you post it on instagram and then it automatically sends a postcard to your nana or to you know whomever you want to send it to um so there’s some really interesting things that are happening there where like you have high disposable income in a certain group low amount of time that wants to be spent necessarily with like you know their parents or their grandparents depending on you know the the personality um and as basically the trend that’s happening is there’s a huge portion of population that are aging so you’re seeing like the multiples on things like um old folks homes or hospice care actually increasing pretty substantially which is kind of crazy and then there’s there’s got to be more technology plays i don’t have like a giant technology play there i just have seen like a number of people like start to build on that particular trend um and then the last one which i think is really interesting is death that sounded terrible that i found death interesting no i’m not that that’s scary but um there are four or maybe five companies that basically own everything in the literal last mile of your life coffins um uh the the funeral service homes everything that’s being sold in the funeral service homes even like how the memories and kind of like that last part looks um there are some businesses that have tried but because of like the five people kind of owning everything and multi-billion dollar companies what’s the biggest essentially happened i don’t have the names in front of me i know someone tried five years ago um a guy named dave balter in boston basically tried to start a like memory company where basically you would load up memories essentially and then all of a sudden you would get that information back via alexa so you could be like oh alexa would tell me about my grandpa or something like that and what happened like six years ago or something with him um in an adventure but um he was the one telling me that like basically he would go visit you know these companies like hey maybe i could sell to these companies and they were all like buttoned up suits you know all that kind of fun stuff and so that’s a space that i think given the aging population there’s probably something there that makes sense as well gotcha okay let’s switch gears real quick you had said something else which was um let’s do some quick hits okay so let’s try to do these uh give me the kind of the quick quick jab on these you said i used nsa learnings to do competitive intelligence what the hell are you talking about yeah yeah yeah so i my first job out of school i worked at nsa uh so i was an intel analyst best way to put it i was like jack ryan’s desk job so none of the cool stuff i did have weapons and defensive driving training which is kind of cool the defensive driving training is like so much more useful than the weapons training in my real life um but what’s really interesting about it is it’s basically was the best career start in like first principles thinking and like thinking about like a target um and so i had a competitive intel program basically at profitwell it was just me running it where um i had every quarter i had stats and it’s kind of like what you guys have talked about before but like a little bit deeper so what i did is i had shadow lists of like our each competitor even our partners like customers and i would send like shadow nps surveys um you know product research surveys these types of things and the thing that people miss on competitive intel is like it has to be done over time um and this is something that like they teach you when you’re going after a target on the inside which is like i need to understand not just a point i need to understand like multiple points in order to kind of create a profile basically and how did you get this how did you get that mps stuff no he said he sent a fake nps i straight up sent surveys to their customer sent surveys to their so walk me through that how do you get through all your research methodologies this is crazy fascinating yeah yeah so um there’s two there’s two main sources of information there’s moles and then mass data moles are like qualitative like almost like customer development product conversations these are former employees these are um you know customers i know that are friendly to me they’re not going to switch because of whatever but i can like talk to them okay well let’s pause that former employees you go you find okay this person used to work here what what happens what is the what is the guy i do this all the time present this way yeah me and sam talked about this on the pod once but totally so i like you meet him at a conference uh oh it looked like on twitter that didn’t end well they weren’t like after four long wonderful years at so and so i’ve now moved on but it was like i’m now over here right they took out the competitor name that’s someone i want to like a better phrase target and have a conversation with and be like hey man how’s everything going right like that type of a thing um and again you’re not going to get a vast amount of information but again it’s about collecting different points right and then i’ve talked to an investor and then i’ve talked to an investor who’s thinking of investing in the company and then i’ve talked to like some customers who are officially churning from the product and all of a sudden i can start putting this together but that the more fascinating stuff and that’s color right like that’s color that kind of guides your analysis because you as an analyst what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to predict what’s going to happen or based on some sort of stimulus what they’re going to do right so if all of a sudden something comes in or there’s a feature that’s launched or some sort of messaging or marketing thing that happens what are they going to do and that’s going to help you respond to whatever they’re going to do right and prepare for it right so that was really interesting because you almost get like feel from those types of people like oh it turns out like there’s an exodus a lot of people are leaving that’s great let’s step on the gas here but the real kind of secret sauce is what you know sam started asking about which was there are many lists of customers that you can find um if they have some sort of a snippet obviously built with clear bit all those types of things right that’s one everyone likes to talk about their customers right so they have case studies that’s two everyone likes to put the logos on their website that’s three right and so you’re looking at social you’re looking at built with you’re looking at all these logos and then i’m like well who’s the main customer right i can go find all those email addresses right and you’re not looking for like oh my god i have ten thousand people because most of these people have ten thousand customers right but we’re looking for is enough but then i’m gonna start sending on in every three month basis a survey or every other month i’m going to send an nps survey and then i’m going to send so what domain did you send the survey from like yeah like your name plus feedback feedback.com or something or what there’s a couple i don’t want to go too deep but like like probably like meditation’s already fried on this so like um let’s say you’re let let’s say you’re trying to uh let’s say you’re creating a hubspot competitor and you want to get hubspot mps information you send an email that it’s like um hubspacefeedback.com or like get hubspot feedback.com or something like that i wouldn’t go that far because if someone finds that out like it looks real bad right um but what i would and i’m sure people are gonna think everything i’m saying is really bad but like whatever right and so what i would do is i’ll do more like marketing softwareresearch.com or something to that effect and then the way that i position it is hey so and so you’ve been identified as a user of hubspot i would love 30 seconds of your time to understand what you love and what you don’t love right and the 30 seconds there 30 to 60 seconds there is really important we’ve sent our pricing software’s fed through surveys we’ve sent like probably 10 million surveys at this point if you’re not compensating someone on an individual basis the raffle thing doesn’t work it’s i mean it will work with some people but most people doesn’t work but if you’re not compensating you have 30 to 60 seconds so i’ll send a survey that max five questions right nps standard question here’s five features what’s the most appreciated most preferred feature of that list same list what’s the least preferred right so three questions maybe i’ll throw in uh anything else you want to tell us about hubspot right and then all of a sudden i have like a picture and then i’m gonna send oh it’s interesting we’re thinking about building this thing they’re thinking about building that thing like let’s do something next next quarter or next month but the same survey can be sent multiple different times but the important thing here is you’re building a timeline right because now all of a sudden i can see these trends and what was really interesting and the thing that i told you guys about was not only so first you should never show this information to your product team it is the worst information like we’ve seen like competitive based product teams are really bad like it just doesn’t work um but i have data and i’m happy to share it that competitive based marketing teams like teams that it’s correlative of course it’s not causal but those folks who have competitive programs typically have much better retention and lower cac so because they just understand what are you talking about what basically he’s saying what in planning is what he’s saying is you learn this stuff if you go tell the product team hey here’s here’s what they said they want or here’s what you should build them up they screws them up they don’t they don’t build the right stuff but if you go you should be part of the team and you say here’s what’s here’s what pain points were most important to them or here’s what benefits were most important to them or here’s what here’s how they rank these guys versus us the marketing teams if you have that competitive intel as part of your process a marketing team will perform better than a marketing team without that perfect example real world example we start hearing this is the early days of the metrics product we realize getting accuracy for metrics is actually incredibly difficult because it’s not like marketing metrics that can be like five percent off like financial metrics if you tell me i have this much money that’s supposed to be in my bank account i’m making decisions based off that it has to be 99.9 if not 100 right so we start feeling this just as a product team all of a sudden we start hearing from some of my like my my moles if you will and they don’t know that they were these people just to be clear it’s not like i turned them and they’re like you know there’s drops and everything like that but also i start hearing like ah yeah we’re using up the accuracy sucks right so all of a sudden we start hearing this totality of information all of a sudden that is our core marketing strategy every single time comparison pages we didn’t do that many of them but every single comparison page is the number one thing all of our ads like competitive ads that’s what they were and then over time all of a sudden that became their home pages right because they’re reacting to us rather than us reacting to them because we found the snippet that makes the most sense and the the most like aggressive thing um if this doesn’t sound aggressive enough is so i have all this data i have all this information i’ve collected it i’ve synthesized it i know by the way do you keep that like a spreadsheet or like a notion and you’re making and you’re writing like narrative formats it depends on how i’m using it right so the data is just tracking over time right so i’ve i can send you like some slides or something like that so i have some slides that like i put together for when we were going to go raise money for the first time as well because it’s just really good data in general one thing i have is is basically spreadsheets that has a lot of this information especially the qualitative and then the other thing that i build off of this are red team docs i don’t know if you guys know what those are but basically like every thought i’ve had or every thought that i learned from this data because this data like customer data and market data is probably 10x more important but this is like some interesting data that’s easy to talk about in a podcast um but red team docs is when i look at all this data it’s like what are the things that kill us every single thought that i’ve had that could like kill us or hurt us goes into a dock some of those docs get built out oh someone accuses me of x someone says this on twitter and then it basically at minimum has here are the steps that we’re going to take so that when that thing happens all of a sudden we have a head start on the little critical piece of the thinking um but to make a long story short the the thing that i reference with you guys is i would have like these are all funded competitors so they would try to go raise money i would have their um the people they were trying to raise money from come to me like not tell me that they were trying to raise money but it’s obvious because they invest in the space it’s not the associate it’s like the partner coming like all that kind of stuff some of them would straight up tell me like hey we’re thinking of investing and so and so what do you think but what i would do then is i would show them these slides and i would just basically be like here’s all the information on us and and the person that you’re thinking of investing in i wouldn’t say that unless they were upfront about it and what it i i know for one we we killed one of the rounds that someone was trying to raise like i can tell you that definitively um because one like okay i’m gonna invest in someone going against this psycho who like has all this information right like that’s pretty scary thing and then two like all of our numbers are better because i you know we just ended up you know doing really well at certain a certain number of things right and so um that that i think is again it’s a program that i think that you should have at least at a bare minimum um from a marketing and go to market perspective if you have a market that becomes really competitive if you’re in like the blue ocean as they say like it’s probably a waste of time um but it’s just something where our ocean got red real quick um i think the look on your face tell me what you’re thinking right now i think i’m very good at research and i’m very good at doing what i do which is like doing the exact same thing of finding moles getting intel reverse engineering you have said i think i’m a nine out of ten you have said some some things to me that i realize that there’s another couple levels that i can go to improve it’s pretty magical uh the that’s pretty amazing yeah well then keep in mind like i have all this market data right so that was interesting too because all of a sudden i can understand like so for example covet hit again i can’t look at anyone’s accounts and we’re very very um very very like strict about that but i can see oh this sector that has 50 plus accounts which is our terms this sector’s tanking this sector’s taking off i can change my marketing almost instantly right and when you have some competitive intel especially on segments like i knew the segments that our competitors were going after and i knew the segments we were going after um it just helps feed the wheel and when you’re feeding the wheel and you’re getting that phd in your business which i think is really important if you’re if you’re going all in like all of a sudden it’s like now a lot of the decisions like we don’t have to think about because it’s like we know what’s happening we know what string is being pulled let’s react to it let’s respond to it and kind of go from there how much of your time is spent on that r sorry well now it’s a system best way possible it’s a system now so it’s a system so i don’t spend that much time i just get the collect right and it’s just documentation right so for example i have names like i know i have i have six names that i can tell you of users of a competitor of ours i see them pretty regularly especially since events are back i’m friends with a couple of them right and i’m not like i i’m not hiding the fact like hey how’s it going with competitor a right like i’m not hiding it right like and that and that’s the thing that like there’s a point here where i think you’re you’re kind of being an [ ] like and and you’re you know being like conniving and then there’s a point where you’re just like being smart and collecting data and i try to stay like obviously on that part of the divide if that makes sense did you ever think about turning would you ever turn that into a business yes yeah i think you could create a really good business around collecting nps data honestly g2 crowd reviews that’s where there’s a ton of like data like i would love someone should create this because it would just do my job which is great um quarterly report kind of like for this is the thing forrester reports i think there’s also like a market to like blow that whole business up give me like quarterly reports instead of these reports where you called 100 people a quarterly report on the same company or on the same industry that has here the reviews the new reviews positive of a competitor hear the bad reviews negative of a competitor um here’s mps data all that kind of fun stuff and you know again you have to be careful on how much you use this information like you’re using it to build like a profile you’re not using it to like immediately react to and that’s a mistake a lot of people make shauna and i had we brainstormed this a lot and we were talking about how we both use glass door reviews because even though like glass doors typically like either fake or incredibly happy employees or like disgruntled employees there’s not really a middle but like you could still get a lot of interesting information from there and you get instrument information from like linkedin like they’ll say like you know i manage a pipeline of a 10 million dollar a year business and like oh okay thanks for telling me and like we would like we we we brainstorm this idea of this business where we i think we call it like i spy or something or like it involved like spying on like many people in a in a particular industry and just sending you an email because you can use like facebook ads manager and be like oh wow these guys just made a switch they are now targeting older women as opposed to younger women and we called it like spy something and it’s kind of funny you worked for the nsa you you you you know you are the spy that we were talking about so like it is kind of interesting i do think actually a business could be built doing this i can’t find this client info have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform so it shares its data across every application every team can stay aligned no out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases hubspot grow better i think the problem is is that so i’ve been talking about customer development customer research because you should do all of this for your customers that’s what you first start with rather than your competitors like better stuff sounds sexier right but i think that like i used to talk when i give talks at conferences or like events all about customer development 15 of people like care and then even when you give them like everyone cares everyone tweets the tweet oh yeah you should talk to your customers right 15 people actually do the work and then when you actually take care of the work for them and just give them the data and this is the one risk of this type of a business i’m sure there’s a big business in it but then they like don’t know what to do with it right and so all of a sudden it’s like okay you’re kind of giving people information which that’s probably fine because it’s a vitamin then like they don’t they they like that they have it right but then actually implementing on stuff like they probably don’t do it and that means like i don’t know if you if you get a 36 month customer like i’ll take it right like they don’t need to be 60 months necessarily for for you to build a big business you’re doing one other thing that i find fascinating uh actually actually well there’s two you said you’re but i’ll start with the less fascinating one you said you’re buying a [ ] ton of debt for pennies on the dollar and gonna forgive it so what’s actually going on there everyone wants to be mr beast on a long enough timeline everyone wants to be mr beast that’s what it feels like theory i like it no so like here’s the thing i i’m probably going to reinvest everything that i got into this into like another business did you say how much how much did you make from the sale trying i gotta work with a lot of people uh so i’m trying not to to be super over or under nine figures i’m not going to say what i got let’s just put it that way i was i asked you if it was over or under 100 million dollars and it took you a minute to think about it so what i’m going to assume it’s that number give or take 30 percent give or take 30 yeah let’s just let’s but like again part of its stock it’s not all cash like there’s a lot of different factors here that we i don’t want to get into but i am i’m going to i’m fine right now like i’m going to do fine that if that makes sense so um but i want to reinvest it because like again i’m i’m not a car guy i’m not like and again i’ve had it for like two months i went from like this is a fun fact i did the whole dave ramsey don’t have any debt pay off the house as soon as possible thing so in january i had twenty thousand dollars in my bank account in a paid off house like that was it and then this happened so um i haven’t adjusted to it is what i’m trying to say so like this might change in like six months but i i want to like you know i want to go all out and go all out not in a way of like you know like fancy cars and stuff like that but like in stuff that’s really interesting and gets me on the quickest path to learning and one of the reasons for the debt thing um and also the i don’t know if you’re gonna bring up the other one but like the debt thing was this mark the debt market’s just crazy like it’s insane right it’s it’s insane how much debt there is how that debt is purchased i don’t understand it and this is one of the ways that i can like really understand it and also do some good in the world where it’s like i can buy a bunch of debt for pennies on the dollar i can understand how that system works how debt collectors work how the debt collector sell to another debt collector um and then also like obviously forgiveness so make it simple what what debt have you bought what how are you buying debt what bet are you buying are you buying it what are you doing with it yeah yeah i’m i have not actually purchased the debt yet right i am basically exploring right now i just put some feelers out because that’s the other thing the debt market who did you reach out to to see if you can acquire something see that’s the interesting part that’s about to was about to bring up it’s so shadowy that like there’s not like a website that’s like we buy all the debt and then sell the debt and all that kind of stuff there’s nothing so i have a buddy um i think he’s i don’t know if he’s cool with me saying his name but he used to he runs a really cool subscription conference now but he used to do this and i was asking him he was on like the the board of one of these debt agent like associations like a business association and i was like hey man isn’t it scammy and he’s explaining to me that like in that market there’s like 20 of the market that’s like very bad like those are the ones you hear all the stories about threatening people the other part of the market like he was in this he was like he would just call people and be like hey like what can you do right because he bought it for pennies on the dollar so he’s like give me 30 percent great like he made money they get it done all that this is like someone who studied that market this is like someone who owes two thousand dollars because they got an x-ray or took an ambulance or um yeah i don’t know whatever else you have credit card debt for right yeah and the other thing is the reason the reason this is interesting and this is like to kind of speak a little bit more like how i’m thinking is like i don’t want to build a quilt company although it would be fascinating don’t get me wrong like i the stuff polymer lucky’s doing in defense i’m i’m all about it the stuff that like uh aaron swartz did uh before his passing like in terms of opening up uh databases that were that were behind um gateways but supposed to be free making them free like that’s the type of stuff i want to do and like if you look at debt money in politics and defense those are three giant areas where like there’s huge things holding us back um cost plus pricing and defense is holding us back the palmer’s working on it debt there’s just so much debt um most of it’s student or not most of it but a lot of it’s student debt and so like there’s something interesting there of like how can you make money but also like not be a jerk right and also like you know take that burden off people’s plates and then politics money and politics there’s something there because i don’t think we’re just gonna magically have you know people wake up and be like let’s vote against having this much money in politics so like what’s the world would look like where you accelerate the money in politics and hopefully break some of the log jams and kind of go from there so that’s that’s those are the three things i really think about um in terms of like post paddle life if that makes sense and uh sam you want to do anything on those otherwise there’s one yeah well before we i want to get to this last one this is interesting but i i do want to do a quick i have a quick question which is you you’re 32 right 33 how old are you uh yeah 30 33 yeah i turned 34 in a couple months so you’re 33 34. you just made a huge sum of money have you done the math to when you become a billionaire uh i’m sure you have and uh how does it feel to have such a huge sum at such a young age i mean that’s pretty wild right here’s the thing i learned and some of your guests so actually friend of the show hermosie i talked to him a couple weeks ago and what i told him and he kind of was like yeah exactly back was it amplifies the worst in you and the best in you you’re just the same person right so like i thought when i was gonna get money i was gonna like oh i’m gonna be healthier because i can like afford you know someone to yell at me about eating it’s like no like now i can afford to go to terrible places all the time right and you know i could afford that before but like i think it’s one of those things where i’m a big believer something i talk a lot about and i don’t know if this is interesting but like teddy roosevelt of all people wrote this speech called the strenuous life and is basically his concept and i think it’s a better speech everyone references man in the arena i think man in the arena is [ ] versus strenuous life he basically said in a modern parlance like if you’ve been given something like whether it’s you know middle class life upper class life whatever it is if you’ve had an exit even though you worked for it right whatever like your duty is to re like go be strenuous again right your duties to go crazy and like you know go deeper do make big swings right and that’s why i’m talking about like i don’t want to go into quilting because it’s like yeah there’s a money grab there i think it’s great but like i want to like fix democracy i want to like have defense i want to fix debt like i want to try and fix those types of things um because i think like for every person doing that like you obviously have tons of people that are digging ditches who have no ability to like you know they’re leading a strenuous slice because they have to so yeah i’m and i know that sounds like i don’t know people judge that answer like in multiple different ways but like yeah i’m having fun but i’m also like all in right like i’m trying to go and it’s part of the reason we went to paddle is like i didn’t want to like hand over the keys because i wasn’t done yet i want to see what a company going through a public offering like looks like like i want to see that so that i can decide do i like that do i want to go big next or do i want to do more like small [ ] so that’s kind of what what i’m thinking about if that makes sense when you were younger were you kind of like highly competitive at anything or like you know you between ages i don’t know 12 to 18 did if you look back now if you were like a a researcher just getting to observe you behind the glass panel would you have seen anything in the way you behaved that would lead you to think oh this guy is going to have like a really interesting career in life or would you have looked like an you know an average teenager at that time yeah so i had a not i don’t know how sam would look at this i had like a midwest childhood let’s say a bad midwest childhood which is like the things that happened to me like would clearly be abused today but maybe back then like they were like okay and um so there was that and i think that like that makes me an incredibly insecure human being like i’m incredibly insecure about like most things but what i kind of learned and i don’t know if this was trial and error but i had some good like mentors in life is like instead of like taking that and go become you know a deadbeat like channel it right like use that anxiety like and channel it the one thing in the answer to your question fun fact i am a national champion debater um so i uh i did speech and forensics um in in high school should i make the joke john yeah or do you like it would you consider yourself a master 12 year old 12 year olds i love it yeah so i i did by the way so this is this segment i don’t know if you heard this we did this segment on here i said i’ve observed these three patterns people who are amazing at debate go on to do amazing in business people are amazing gamers can go on to do amazing um i think poker was maybe my other one but those three are like not you wouldn’t associate that with success in the business world but they have like this i just keep seeing it over and over and over again well so you know what it is so i i did um so i like i was doing football and like wrestling and all that stuff i had to have foot surgeries for whatever some reason and basically i was like oh i can’t i can’t do wrestling that season so i went and started doing what’s called forensics when you’re in high school then i was like oh you can get scholarships so i went to the school i went to on scholarship to to do this and it was one of the best schools in the country for it it’s bradley university like lovely school but like as the northwestern kids would make fun of us in illinois like you get a public school education at a private school price basically unless you’re on scholarship that type of thing and if you think about it so what i was doing is at least in college for 40 hours a week four years i was synthesizing information and structuring arguments and getting to root cause right which are these things that we always talk about i never wanted to go into business i my dad still thinks i should be a doctor i was going to go into law law but you know more people were graduating you know in law school than actual legal jobs when i graduated so long story short it was one of those things where i was like you know i can synthesize information really quickly right and that’s like i talk a little faster and all this other stuff and so i think that’s that’s helped me a lot because literally our marketing strategy in the early days was i just write blog posts and i can write them pretty quickly and they’re relatively deep they’re not all gems but you know it’s one of those things that that definitely helped me and i use it i probably use it every day you want to go to the last one sean this is the most interesting one you’re doing you’re also doing a hostile takeover publicly traded person so i saw this is this guy i don’t know how you say it i’ve only heard like the background k mikey m is his handle and so there’s this guy yeah yeah yeah tell the story who’s this guy what did he do with him what the heck are you doing okay again quickest path to learning that’s i think that’s really important for like entrepreneurs executives in general mike merrell like 13 years ago 2008 something like that he became the first publicly traded person so he sold shares in himself he’s there’s an interface the the website is a little buggy sometimes but there’s an interface he sold shares he gets the money but then what he does is he gets to choose to put votes up and then the people who bought shares vote their shares and he doesn’t do little stuff like he does little stuff like what color glasses should i get so a lot of the things we probably don’t want to make decisions on ourselves which is really interesting hack but he also what he’ll do is he goes and he’ll put should i move in with my girlfriend he puts that up for a vote the debate is fascinating because some of them are his friends and his family and then there’s just randos in connecticut being like i’ve known mike for like a long time through the project i don’t think this makes sense he said this like three years ago blah blah blah blah it’s fascinating so i knew about this uh girlfriend what’s the url again say spell it out k mikey m k m i k e y m.com so i i got a little money and i was like i’ve i don’t know what it’s like to like do a takeover of a company right and this is when elon musk was like doing his stuff with twitter and so long story shirt i was like oh this could be fascinating one because there’s like i don’t know how people react when this stuff happens and so he put an auction up for um additional shares and this is what he does every so often when he needs some cash he’ll actually put an auction up and people can buy presumably if it’s a dutch auction under the share price right and i did like by the way do you like do you get anything as a shareholder you there’s no dividends there’s no like uh nothing like that you can sell your shares people buy like shares so like i put my shares up and get money like actually get cash right dude sean go to the website so he he just says the things so look let me give you an example it’s called the finger holders contract gig i guess finger hole is the name of the company but the short the tl dr is should i take a short term gig contract coordinating the development of a community around the launch of an nft project called finga hole finger holders yeah and then it goes the whole background of like why i’m interested in this why do i want to do this what are the contract details how much they’re going to pay me what’s the proposal and then there’s 300 i think there’s like a crazy amount of comments that says like pros working on a project sounds fun cons nfts are divided the uh divisive and it may alienate some of your shareholders and there’s like incredibly thoughtful discussion on why he totally what so listen to this so i sneakily i start buying shares and i start researching people who haven’t been active because you can see the last time they like logged in and stuff because i want to start contacting them he launches this auction of about 2 000 shares and i know that ev most votes there’s only about 5 000 shares that are voting so i was like cool if i get 2000 shares which is like 10 11 of the entire thing and then i did a sneaky way of doing the auction which we can get into if it’s interesting but anyways so i get the shares and then i go speak at his shareholder meeting he has a show how much did you pay for the 2000 shares uh i was like 13 grand and so his market cap is only like uh yeah it’s not it’s it’s that’s 130 000 where everyone gets in yeah so right now he’s got i think 16 000 shares or something that have been sold and the share price i haven’t checked today but there’s a share price it goes up and down based on like purchases and stuff but he’s worth it it’s in the six figure range i think ballpark i think so yeah yeah so if you owned all the shares theoretically that’s the value but then the other thing is the community makes it interesting so i go speak at the shareholder conference and i go hey and it’s on youtube and i say listen i’m doing a hustle takeover of mike here’s why like i think the project’s undervalued you guys voted to like make him not go on social media like that doesn’t make sense like in order to get more people he has to like do this blah blah i think and then all the questions are like well what about like is this good for mike because there’s a lot of his friends like his actual in-person friends and i was like listen i think what’s good for what’s good for the share price is good for mike and vice versa and i talk about it it’s like a half hour interview i did and and then everyone and then there’s all these people especially the people who don’t know him who are like i think patrick i think the takeover is good for the project i think it’s this you only need to go through lulls 500 to a thousand more shares roughly to control the vote you thought uh no no i already i already had i got 1930 out of the auction right right but you said each vote has about five thousand and you just need that yeah you just need 51. it’s never it’s never one-sided it’s never one-sided so like if it’s can swing 2500 vote and and what’s funny is i’m texting him and i’m like hey man just so you know here are my intentions like it’s like a little it’s a little takeover right that that’s cool that’s like some insider trading though no uh no i didn’t i don’t do anything just like when he left the shares elon goes and talks to perrag and he’s like hey look i’m doing this and here’s what i want to do with twitter and also there’s kind of nothing you could do about it but i’m going to inform you because that just seems like you know the standard the writing process here yeah what does uh what is what obligation does this guy have to follow what you say like we know what if he just says ah [ ] off i’m done with this project in i mean he could shut the project down i don’t know like so first before i started doing this i started tweeting to him about what happens if there was a hostile takeover elon musk seems interesting right because i wanted to see like is this like it’s is this gonna be a good investment probably not but like i’m learning i can’t tell you how much i’m learning right because all of a sudden it’s like oh interesting shareholder mate they responded to this and these aren’t like the investors that i want to be working with in the rest of my life but it’s really fascinating um he has never for to my knowledge in 13 years gone against what a vote has said but he could it’s all in good faith he could i mean there’s no yeah there’s no like oh my god i can sue him or anything also he he gets to choose what he puts up for vote so if he’s like yeah you know i just want to move on to my girlfriend i don’t have to put it up for a vote but there has been some talk of you get to burn some of your shares in order to put a vote up for a vote which is fascinating it’s he’s been covered by wired atlantic all kinds of stuff it’s it was in a lull and i’m injecting some excitement into it again and yeah i’m looking at the price chart so it looks like it’s it started 2008 it opened at a dollar 99 cents it looks and it basically was like between one and three dollars then it kind of peaked in 2013 maybe he got some press or something like that it was 13 yeah 1350 something like that and then for the last six years it’s basically been flat at roughly four or five bucks for a takeover and and now it’s 685 right now and so um it was about five when i started the takeover this is far more interesting to be as small as as it is right i mean it’s cool to be as unknown of a project it feels it feels unknown to be as unknown of a project as it is it’s been around this 2008 it’s pretty under covered right well so in the beginning he got a lot he was like on the today show he was on all kinds of stuff and then he did because what was interesting is he’s had some epics with it like a project was i think it was called the girlfriend project and it was literally about his relationship his his girlfriend buys shares his ex-girlfriend is still a shareholder i’m pretty sure his current i don’t know if it’s his wife or not is like a shirt like and that was the end of the shareholders meeting was his ex-girlfriend his current girlfriend or wife having a conversation it was the most interesting like half hour i’ve ever seen in my life because they were just and they’re friendly i think there might be friends but just them talking about mike and it’s kind of beautiful because you have all these people who like either just from a money perspective or just a fascination perspective in my case or from a love perspective like supporting this guy and like trying to make the right decisions for him so i think it’s brilliant like as soon as i announced this on twitter we got some inbound from like some like i don’t think they’re documentarians or something like that like i don’t know if it’ll come with anything but it’s like it’s a fascinating story that i think deserves more more more give so i’m glad you asked about it because you guys have a pretty medium audience so it’s great there’s there’s even like a what happens when i die like unlike a company i will die so what happens to my shares after i die there’s like this is pretty crazy i mean it kind of makes no sense in that like yeah you know there’s yeah it’s completely nonsensical yeah but bro you bought a 150 000 image of a monkey so like this is you know like did you buy a name punk you got a oh you’re a punk guy this is from ape fest so this is my nice fun little yeah it was a 50 it was a coin flip to uh use the milk portfolio either we buy up an ape or a punk and they were the same price on that day and we knew that the the purchase was gonna have to happen the board was about to buy the punks and so it was like what do we which asset should we buy knowing this news is about to break or it has just broken or something and we flipped punk and then apes went through the roof and punched something down everything’s down now too it’s interesting very interesting dude check this out so if you go to uh mike’s blog so there’s news.kmikeem.com where he like it’s ran like a shareholder company i mean like like the investor relations page of a publicly traded company and he has the list of all of his principles and on health it says like as of october 23 2019 i’m in favor of experimenting with psychedelics and you click psychedelics and there’s a like notes from a board meeting about like who voted and why they voted and what is the reason and what the reasoning is and how they are or are not going to start doing psychedelics then in 2016 i will not take uh a psyllium pills i don’t know what that is um and it’s like talks about why he wanted to take them and everyone’s voting and he has like a update on that and then like entertainment um shareholders will have direct control over my television television watching i will and then 2019 i will watch spiderman i will not subscribe to spotify yeah some of these are like stupid like the glasses one it says that 34 users voted with 1800 shares so 34 people participated in that vote for the glasses i guess that was not a very uh not a very big one let’s see this and if i didn’t put i haven’t i’m pretty 44 people like who he’s voting for like president up like he’s done stuff like that as well which gets really fascinating yeah but that’s just as meaningless as the classes interesting uh i believe he’s in oregon so i’m not sure i mean he’s in a state that is going to vote one way or the other anyways wow yeah 2020 i will endorse bernie sanders for president okay uh amazing listen man this was this was fun uh i’m glad you came on and uh yeah good times thank you brought some good stuff sam what do you think dude can you send me send me the uh the research thing that was the most fascinating thing that was really interesting and i’ll send you some redacted i’ll send you the structure and you can don’t redact it no no one will i won’t share it with any of these losers it’ll just be for me don’t get back let me think about it i met again i have a boss i’m on a board i gotta be careful now so yeah well are you guys i’ll send you something and paddle isn’t public now but it will be uh i mean we’re we’re not going next year in a number of years probably before anything like that right but i’m great you know there’s no laws i’ll hook you up i’ll hook you up with something don’t worry don’t worry this was awesome i i typically hate having not hate i say no to everyone shawn brought you in yeah we kind of hate having guests then we have many ways and we’re not we’re not fully sure why we do it but we do it in the moment it seems like a good idea halfway through the episode it’s like yeah i kind of wish i was just bullshitting with sam uh instead of doing this conversation but i’m always happy when we do it because i don’t have to prepare one out of every four is awesome and i’ll just hope that everybody thinks they’re that one out of four you actually were that one out of four so good for you what makes a good guest versus not a good guess just for the audience to hear if they come in they listen to the pod if they already know the vibe if they know the the what’s cool that that tends to work really well i think what do you think sam i agree and most people ha most people aren’t like sean and i and that they don’t do this for a living and so they need to come prepared with the things and even us we come some the re we do research sometimes we do sometimes we don’t but there’s at least bullet points so it’s like all right next and you did a good job of saying next a lot of people um if you i don’t know if you paid attention but sean very purposely in the beginning he’s like i don’t really care about the company in your background let’s just move on to the other stuff and uh we actually we we tend to do that a lot and so that was cool um and so that’s also the least interesting except for michael saylor that episode was like that episode was money because he was just so weird like it was just like what’s gonna happen guys like what’s gonna happen the next minute that was that was an interesting one did you hear when he out alfied me i was like yeah i like fast cars he goes hey i don’t like fast cars but i have a really fast jet that’s well no the quote the quote i tell everyone from that episode is yeah i don’t really like things that you can’t in normal use go at their max speed like and that’s what he was referring to with cars like it was like boats and jets i’m allowed to to go at max speed you know cars not really so i just i thought who even has that thought about like am i utilizing this machine to its fullest velocity into bitcoin that’s that’s who has that thought which is great that those people exist dude sean i did you see on my instagram or twitter or something i did i uh this weekend i was in the hamptons uh that’s not a humble brag it was my in-laws house so i had nothing to do with it but and that’s a midwest thing he just did a midwest thing just so you know they’re very very blessed oh i have a yeah i have an equinox member but like they’re gonna do my laundry so it’s like worth it was on sale it was my in-laws house and i went out there and i drove we went to the beach for a bonfire in the fourth and we drove by this area that was just pat it was like a it’s like a small one-lane road and it was packed full of cars but they were fancy cars and in front of me was a bugatti and it was a special bugatti and i looked it up there’s like a 5 million bugatti and i was like what the [ ] is going on here and so i get to the parking lot to park my car and it was full of black limousines but not limousines like the escalades full of them and then in the corner one of the limos had their trunk open and literally i’m not exaggerating i have a video of it a hundred limousine drivers were just hanging out drinking coke eating chips and i was like what the [ ] is going on here and they go it’s michael rubin’s party uh michael rubin has a famous white party and i made a joke i was like he only lets whites in which they didn’t like the drivers no yeah yeah i was like you know like oh white’s holy really that’s weird maybe i should go um i don’t know it was a bad joke and anyway i go reuben and they go yeah it’s reuben he he’s having this party he’s famous he goes i drove this one guy was like yeah we drove drake and it’s like i was like yeah jay-z’s there and i was like wait really and i looked it up on instagram and it was this crazy party and i was like uh well tell me everything he goes you know i drove this guy and he’s broke one guy goes uh i drove tyreese you remember tyreese from fast and furious yeah yeah yeah he’s like i drove that guy and and the driver goes i’m richer than he is that guy’s broker than a joke i got more money than that guy and i was like wait what really and he like auditioned he he kept telling me all this said he goes the guys who are really rich they typically drive themselves because they got that bugatti and they want to show it off um but it was really fascinating i was just hanging with these we hung with them for like half an hour just asking them all rumors and gossip and they knew it all dude that’s amazing i after you you sent that you sent me that video and then i went on instagram and i saw like six nba players were posting stories from the party so i was like james harden’s at the party and then whoever you know like these other guys were you know joel embiids at the party and it’s the all-white party wherever it is uh everybody’s uh like it was just rappers and athletes it seemed like which is which is great exactly it was it was so cool and like he’s got like this private beach area and then we were like 100 yards down the beach and right next to the parking lot and it was just packed and we there’s bugattis there’s all these crazy cars it was pretty it was i just imagined you in the in the party with like you know that meme where it’s the guy at the party yelling into the girl’s ear and you’re just like it’s a newsletter we my first million i said million yeah no no with an m do you use spotify we’re up there you got video access on no we mostly talk about 12 year old stuff but it’s pretty cool sean no he’s not here he doesn’t leave his house sometimes he has long hair sometimes he has short hair i don’t know no i’m not my in-laws live here no my dad in law is jacked more than i am it’s kind of uncomfortable sometimes that’s [ ] up that bit will not get old for a while that’s awesome i guess we should we gotta end there right yeah thanks for coming dude