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 this chinese indonesian guy was a politician no he was the guy he was the middle man so what he realized was um because i was like okay cool we have this coal what do we do with it he’s like oh we just sell it immediately as soon as we sign the paper we have the call we sell it to exxon and i’m like oh okay so how does that work he’s like well i bought all this coal for two million and then we like i bought all the coal for two million and then we sell it in blocks for 20 million each i’m like well that’s like 400 500 million how are we we’re turning 2 million into 500 million and he’s like yeah i’m like well what that’s amazing like why didn’t exxon why don’t they just go in directly by this i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my all in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back i just got vaccinated um uh that’s pretty cool i got a new toy you want to see oh nice sam’s holding up a gun [Laughter] i was uh just i just drove by a a bass pro shop and i walked in and i was like i was just walking around just to look at like beef jerky or something and i just saw it and i’ve never even remotely owned anything like that and i was like hey those are cool can i buy one get certified or like do a background check or something you just walk into a bass pro shop and buy a gun um well yeah i mean i just walked up to the counter and i go oh those are hand guns those are neat what’s the deal like how do you buy one of those and they go well just give us your driver’s license and we’ll run a background check and you can walk out in five minutes and i go huh sick i’ll take that one you just held it away today like you didn’t hold the gun part you held it with two fingers and like it was pointed sideways yeah i still have to learn how to use it i don’t even have ammo for it and i have like a lock on it i’m like pretty paranoid i got to figure out how to use the damn thing um very texas oh we have something we have well i’m a i’m a texas resident resident now we have something cool happening on wednesday yeah we are gonna interview jake paul which might be in terms of just like famous people might be the most famous person we’ve ever interviewed probably the most famous person i’ve ever met um i met the pope once um i met bill i met bill clinton when he was in office all right you peaked so but jake jake i did that both of those when i was uh like eight years old so jake paul is like number three but when you say you james didn’t pause what does that mean you saw the pope you you shake hands with the pope what is what does it take to meet the pope uh shake hands that said hi in a busy crowd not oh that’s pretty good all right you shook hands let’s see who is the most or did we like more like a high five it was more like a high five bill clinton bill clinton uh i shook his hand and like said hey uh what’s your what’s your real first name and he goes william i go hey why do you have white hair he goes because i’m old and that was so i met him and he asked my name so i actually i actually met bill clinton you really shot your shot with bill clinton well i was like six years what year was that where you already 92 whatever it was i was like going on uh foreign pre yeah pre back when he was still young bill all right um that’s pretty good i met uh the closest thing i ever got to that probably was well i have this really long orlando bloom story that’s very funny but i’m not gonna tell it uh but it’s like if you’re my friend you’ve heard me tell the story 10 times because it’s just a go-to it’s just a winner of a story uh you know the stories that you just like you just have in the bank if you ever need to be like you know the life of the party impress someone um but then i also you know the you know the duke uh duke andrew or something like that i forget his name is duke andrew i think wow i’ll learn how you say his name i know the name is he the guy did he get in trouble with jeffrey upside yeah he just got in trouble uh for that or maybe for other things i don’t know something happened that’s not great for him but he was doing a tour of silicon valley and so we got word that oh the duke is coming to our office uh prince andrew duke of york yeah that’s right uh he was the duke of york so i heard got word oh in the morning the duke of york is coming to the office today can you give a presentation i didn’t know what the duke of york was um still don’t really know what the duke of york is he’s just like not in the prince lineage but whatever so anyways he first a full security detail comes sweeps the whole office you know the morning just to make sure they get the whole layout they know where the entrances are they know where the exits are and uh they’re like okay this place is secure for the duke and he shows up at 4 p.m and i’ve got this like presentation i’ve been working on i threw my whole day away and i just started working on this presentation for the duke and um explaining what we do and why it’s so great i’m like i gave my all and the presentation you’ve been to our office our office has like couches not like kind of chairs it’s a very comfortable couches so he sits down on one of our couches and is just flanked by security guards and i fire up the first slide on the big projector and i start talking and i see that he’s asleep he is uh passed out by the for before the first light even starts he has no he’s fallen asleep in his chair and now i don’t know what to do because i’m giving this presentation to this one guy who’s asleep it’s all my employees who know what the heck we do they don’t need this presentation they all see that he’s asleep i see that he’s asleep the security guards are kind of like not saying anything they’re not doing anything and so i give the presentation to the sleeping duke of york for the first 20 minutes oh my god how crazy i i was so lame i just that’s actually really cringe well i’ll i’ll finish the story with one thing because it’s kind of relevant to what we do so at the end because we were in idea lab and like this podcast about brainstorming business ideas and talking about shooting the [ ] about business ideas so we i basically paused at the end and i was like okay i could keep going but it would be more fun if you actually joined us in doing what we do and kind of brainstorm some business ideas and so we asked him a bunch of questions we’re like do you guys like what apps do you guys use and he was like we don’t have phones like what he’s like he’s like we don’t get to use our like personal cell phones i guess at that time i didn’t know exactly what he’s saying but there’s some limitation where they don’t have they don’t just have like iphones with normal apps and they can do whatever they want it’s like very like pre-installed use this phone use what it has and like if you want more go to it and they’ll they’ll help you or something like that and then i go what business ideas you have he goes there needs to be a fact checker so politicians can’t lie i was like what he’s like we need to hold politicians to to what they say there’s so many politicians that just lie and we need them to and everything should be on the right everything should be like on the record it’d be fact checked at all times it should be public if you’re lying that was his idea number one and then he had something else i was like about like i don’t know like digitizing paperwork or something like that and i was like all right thanks prince so there’s actually wait i could riff on that there’s this thing called politico politica uh what is it uh i actually don’t know how you pronounce this oh god everyone makes fun of me for not politico no uh polita have you ever heard of that no um so what it does is it looks at uh like when there’s a big um uh big election they analyze all the major speeches uh done by some by someone so in the case of trump or uh biden when they were doing their debates they would they have a meter that is says true mostly true half true false i’ve seen this pants on fire and they actually check all the stuff they say and they say this is or is that true here’s why and it’s kind of cool uh uh politifact i guess it’s called it’s by the way i like that it goes to panto fire that’s a nice thing that’s pretty cool um i like that uh so your your boy was on to something not a great business but it it does there is something that does this right um um okay wait one more thing you said uh we got on this tangent because you said jake paul is coming on wednesday so um why is jake paul coming on and what are we gonna do about it so jake paul okay so uh i am basically copying sean and i started investing in some companies and jeffrey wu is a friend of mine i think he’s a friend of yours too uh yeah i’m mildly close friends with him and he saw that i was investing and i saw that he was investing and he goes and we were just shooting the [ ] i go what are you doing and he said what are you doing we exchanged ideas he goes hey you just want to do a phone call i’ll bring on my partner jake and i was like oh are you partnering with jake paul he goes yeah yeah i’ll bring him on and uh i go all right sounds good so we just do a zoom and i’m sitting there with jeffrey and or jeff and uh jake and jake’s like hey what’s your cell let’s just have a text chat like a group uh thread and uh by the way uh i love my first million and i know the hustle like can i come on the podcast or or i was like yeah sounds good so here we are it’s kind of weird but kind of funny that’s pretty legit uh i also want to know from him well i’m going to ask him but like jeff is like a tech founder sold the company uh started like a company backed by andreessen horowitz it’s like a keto company and um and then somehow somehow like partners with jake paul i don’t even know how they became friends it’s like how did this asian dude from the tech world become like good enough friends with jake paul where they’ll start a business together like do you know that no i don’t i know that jeff moved miami and jeff’s like a manly man like jeff’s into guns and fighting and big muscles and whatever men are supposed to be into and like jake i i assume is also into that stuff so they they must have met and jeff’s real real smart and savvy and i have a feeling that it’s a good stick which is like jake’s the famous one gets access and jack is uh jeff is the straight man who uh you know makes make sure the uh knows how to do it yeah and that’s historically a great partnership it’s actually there’s this guy named brian lee who does this and he’s partnered with uh shapiro i forget shapiro’s first name but shapiro was the lawyer for uh oj oj simpson and they started legal zoom together and he and shapiro was like the celebrity and then he did it with uh kim kardashian and they started shoedazzled together wait weren’t car what was it kardashian’s dad uh kardashian’s dad was the lawyer uh well oj had like eight lawyers robert shapiro is his name oj had like eight lawyers so it was like kardashian it was uh johnny cochran it was uh uh uh whatever yadda yadda and was was he the one who also partnered with jessica alba for the honest yeah so this guy named brian lee uh i guess he’s korean he’s a korean-american um and i guess lee’s korean i think and uh he partnered with shapiro for legal zoom and shapiro was supposed to be like the faith and the famous person turns out shapiro i mean he’s a really successful he’s a savvy business guy so shapira goes let’s do this with some more celebrities so they partner with kim kardashian and they do shoe dazzle which raises a bunch of money but i think kind of flamed out uh but then they do it with one other company and then eventually they do it with jessica alba and honesco on his company and it’s the same thing jessica alba was supposed to be like shapiro kind of like the face the famous person turns out she’s pretty savvy apparently uh and good at uh you know whatever whatever it is she’s good at i guess running a business i don’t know what her role is but she’s great and that’s what he does uh and so partnering with celebrities can actually work out quite well this company is a that’s a big company that’s like a that’s like a big that’s like a billion dollar company i think uh the honest code i think i think what do we want to talk about today i got a bunch of random random topics uh do you want me to start did you have one you wanted to start well i actually was researching a fair bit of your things um because i found them to be a little bit interesting do you want to talk about turned yellow is that interest or how about you lead i’ll let you lead everything and i’ll follow but i researched all your stuff okay we can talk about turned yellow so we’ll start there um this is a cool business so this is in a category that uh our friend ryan beagleman said this word he was the first one i ever heard say this i don’t know if he started it or he picked it up somewhere but it’s the term drop servicing so people have heard of drop shipping which is basically like you market on facebook or wherever else you sell a product to a customer but it’s a product that you don’t hold in inventory you as soon as you get the order from a customer you place an order with your manufacturer the manufacturer ships it directly to the person so it’s a way to do ecommerce without having to buy and hold inventory because you’re just directly shipping to customers straight from the factory and typically kind of like lower margin but it’s a great way to get started if you don’t have any money in e-commerce that’s kind of like the idea turned yellow is actually one of jack smith’s uh favorite things jack might be an investor but i uh i know he’s a huge customer of turned yellow right so what turned yellow does is similar it’s a drop servicing company so instead of shipping your physical product they do a service for you kind of on demand so turned yellow or actually a friend of ours um i don’t know if you know the guy alex uh who’s behind it but uh he bought the company recently and uh i won’t share any like the numbers or anything like that but uh alec too really uh volor volodarsky or something like that volo is how you start the spelling of his last name um you can find him on twitter he’s at volod dark or something like that and he also started this like 90s theme kind of like uh party or parade or thing that used to happen like 90s jam fest or something like that was just all nostalgia which i thought was cool that’s why i first reached out to him and then i found out that our our mutual friends xavier and sieva helped you know invested in him when he bought turned yellow oh so sorry it wasn’t jack it was sieva i’m i’m an investor in cf is fun that’s how i heard about this yes okay exactly so what turned yellow does is they basically it’s a great gift so you can submit a picture of your family or your friend and they’ll send you a drawing uh like an illustration of that same photo or that same person turned into what looks like kind of like a simpsons character like turned yellow like you know all the sims characters are yellow so they make they cartoonize any picture for you so it’s like you you went and got this custom made for your friend so it’s this great gift and um simple simple business they basically on one side they have a whole bunch of artists who can crank out these like illustrations in this one art style and on the other side they just advertise on facebook or whatever and their their number one advertisement is this like uh picture of howie mandel holding up his turned yellow where he got turned yellow and that probably millions of dollars there’s so many replicas so if you keep your ads on and type in turned yellow so there’s turn yellow.com which is i guess i i think the original then there’s simpson simpson phi me then there’s art of yellow and they are all complete total ripoffs the exact same website practically and uh that’s kind of interesting i would have thought this would would have you would have had to have had some type of licensing or blessing from citizens i think it operates in a slightly gray area because they don’t say anything about the simpsons but the art style does evoke that idea that look and i think that’s part of why people are buying it for sure it’s one hundred percent the simpsons i mean they’re sitting in front of the camera he’s my friend so i’m trying i’m trying to say it a little bit softly here so but anyways the cool thing what they were doing was they bought the company the company was doing well i had all these competitors because everybody was kind of doing the same uh everybody was still trying to clone them um and then they brought on this badass licensing guy who has been like in the licensing business for decades and the idea is that he was going to go and actually talk to all the different ip holders of uh simpsons and futurama and harry potter and any other brand and basically say hey we would love to cut a licensing deal with you so that we can do this and do it like totally above board you make some money from this we we lose a little bit of money but we can kind of like knock out all these competitors who are doing this and they don’t want to work in the aboveboard they all want to be under the table here and so that was the business plan and um i don’t know exactly how it’s going now but i thought this was really cool it’s a cool business that does uh you know very good revenue and there’s a whole bunch that are like this and right now what people do is they just do this for every popular theme so it’s like you can do one like a lot of people like rick and morty that’s like a cult phenomenon now so people are doing this with the rick and morty art style and then people are doing this with another art style and this reminds me of what our friend uh silly did where he got the rights to family guy and made the family guy mobile game and he made he made a version of candy crush that was themed family guy so he took a proven game candy crush that’s like super addictive amazing at monetizing and he just skinned it with the family guy branding and got family guy to help promote it and family guy got millions of dollars in revenue from the success of this game and then eventually the same thing with harry potter yeah he did the same thing with tons of stuff how do you think you even like i wouldn’t even know the first thing what do you do do you find someone uh who happens to know someone who knows someone and they introduce you to someone at fox i mean like i don’t even know that seems really hard to to make happen yeah well i think that’s why they brought on a guy who’s done decades of licensing because he has the connections already he maybe worked with these same brands to do a different licensing deal maybe putting faces on t-shirts for bud light or whatever right like uh so i think that’s one thing is like there is a network aspect to it where you can get your foot in the door but i don’t know did you ever listen to the first episode of this podcast with suli where he explained how he got the family guy rights no i mean insane story yeah i listened to the episode but that was uh two years ago now happened yeah basically he was like all right uh first why did he need this they were just making normal mobile games but distribution costs kept going up and up and up because facebook was getting more and more expensive to advertise on because all the game developers were all competing as each other bidding the prices up so he’s like [ ] we need a way to stand out we need a way to acquire users without paying for as much in ads we need a more efficient way to acquire users so he had seen that the simpsons did a mobile game with ea and they made like simpsons like the quest you know i don’t know what it’s called like some simpsons game with ea he’s like oh that’s genius that’s what we need to do and this is before the kim kardashian mobile game and before others started copying this playbook so he’s like okay what’s the next franchise that we can get family guy so family guy is also owned by i think fox yeah and so they have they have simpsons and they have family guys they go to they they get in touch with they you know google around they get in touch with the person to who who’s in charge of the stuff and they’re like yeah like okay i don’t know i’ve never heard of your startup but um we’re gonna probably just go with ea i mean we just did the simpsons with them it was pretty successful like ea is like a big name trustworthy you don’t get fired for going with ea i might get fired if i go with you guys so they’re like okay you know fair enough but they didn’t give up and so what he said was every he had decided like the company was screwed if they didn’t find like pull a rabbit out of a hat so he just put all his chips into this one strategy and was like okay every morning when we come into the office we just have a whiteboard the whiteboard says how do we go get the family guy rights i was like what can we do and uh they would just come up with some ideas and then they would try it that day and then they would like fail and they would come back again the next day and like the next day and then eventually his number two it was only him and two other people who knew about this plan in a company of like 50 60 people i think and so the number two guy was like dude we’ve exhausted we’ve we tried this we tried this we you know blah blah blah and so um eventually mark andreessen was on their board he was their investor so they had asked mark andreessen hey do you you’re super well connected do you know know the guy he said yeah i’ll make a phone call so he makes a phone call they get the meeting but the meeting again is like i don’t know guys so he says all right how do we pull this off he goes first we’re going to economically make this like a ridiculous deal for them so like we’re gonna offer them this ludicrous upfront guarantee of x millions of dollars of you just get that money from day one uh number two you’re gonna get this like awesome fat royalty on the back end uh if this game is successful and um so that was kind of lucrative and they were like okay we’re into that and by the way he didn’t have the money to make like he didn’t have the money to give them yeah promised it and was like i’ll go raise the money if they say yes was his plan and um and then the last thing was they found out that the guy the main guy who’s the decision maker his like mentor or was like a family friend of marc andreessen or something like that and so he’s like oh talk to the mentor guy so they talk to the mentor the mentor is like okay guys i hear what you’re saying i like your spunk like um i’ll i’ll help you out and they put them on the board of their company they’re like dude we’ll give you shares we’ll put you on the board and he was like guys don’t need it it’s okay and he put in the word and basically that that got the guy to like lean their way of like yeah give these guys a chance they’re legit don’t worry about like that they’re not a big household brand in fact these guys will go all out for you it’s life or death for them and that’s what you want in your partner and so that’s how they ended up getting the pitch to work and got the rights to family guy and saved the company do you ever think at least i i mean i think of this and do you um when i think of stories like this i think to myself like why wouldn’t you just go to this person with the job and just be like and just say all the obvious which is dude you don’t want to get fired you also hate your job uh i’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars personally how why are you 100 grand can you please just like like what’s stopping just like total cronyism i mean i guess not what’s stopping it maybe i should rephrase this it’s pretty mind-boggling that that’s not more like there’s not more of that so okay so let’s let’s answer both what’s stopping it well usually the person you want to bribe is in a pretty high up position so they’re doing well already maybe hard up for money maybe how much do you think the person makes a year who’s like in charge of licensing for a family guy yeah i bet you not i bet that guys i bet you that guy’s easily pulling in 300 400 000 okay so that’s not stupid money but that’s good money good money right so he’s not like you know he’s not desperate let’s put it that way second thing uh you know in a big company i don’t know if you’ve had yours yet now that you got acquired but there is like a whole like anti-bribery training you have to do they really put it in your head like hey look even just like taking any gift over 50 tickets to a game you know a dinner you need to report it it could be bribery blah blah so you get it it gets put in your head and you start to think okay do i want to risk it all because if i actually got caught doing this i would basically not be able to have a career anymore so you kind of have to pay me so much that i’m i’m willing to risk the odds of me getting completely blacklisted from my profession where i’ve worked so hard to become a vp after 30 years and i’m not saying that’s like i’m not saying by the way i’m not even remotely implying that i’m into this i’m just saying i’m actually of course you’re saying some other guy might be into this what i’m saying is i’m surprised that this doesn’t i’m surprised it doesn’t happen more it’s just crazy that we all agree that with uh we we mostly all agree what’s right and what’s wrong and we kind of stick to it um because like if julia would be like look man i’m gonna give you this deal if you get fired i’ll give you a job um right but i’m gonna pay i was gonna pay your company 10 million dollars i’ll give you just a million of that i’m shocked one is somebody said this the other day they go so how many employees does amazon have how many points does facebook have how many players google have huh i wonder how many foreign spys work at these companies a lot it’s like it sounds crazy like foreign spy like what is a movie it’s like no no of course it’s not zero like of course there are people working for china for russia for different countries as foreign agents and there’s actually been like cases of this where guys basically took the you know like the machine learning model out on a usb stick out of google and like basically went back to russia or like that’s like a thing that has been has been found um to be happening in these companies so one is it’s crazy that that’s actually happening that you know i’ve probably worked with somebody who is actually like a foreign agent which is just like a bizarre agent on behalf of google i mean how many times do you think that there’s someone who is a facebook employee and they’re like hey look i’m gonna fire you and we’re gonna act like we’re not friends anymore i need you to get a job at snapchat and i’m gonna funnel you money and exactly you tell me everything everything yeah that totally exists which is everything that has to happen we don’t talk about it so then so okay so then um then i was exactly that so i’ve had this experience where i thought honestly i didn’t think anything was wrong with this but again this is where maybe my moral compass is a little screwed up but i was like oh for example when we got acquired we had talked to five other companies while we got acquired and for each of them they’re laying out their map you know how what’s their strategy how they’re going to win how we fit into that strategy you know where they’re strong where they’re weak what the numbers are so when we finally got acquired i was i walked in and i was sort of like guys congratulations you got me you got my team you got our code base but you also got a little bit of intel no they right like i talked to they had no interest i didn’t even say anything but i was like nobody asked me anything that’s insane i and i was like i know i would if i was in that company’s shoes and i acquired somebody who had talked through the strategy with the ceo of all these different companies i would run like so like what they say what do they plan like what how do they view the world well that’s not even for like most people tell me their secrets it’s just like what were they saying it’s like not it doesn’t even seem wrong to me but the fact that nobody asked me tells me huh maybe they do think that would be wrong to ask maybe my compass is screwed up what do you think well this is my whole point which is mo and and i just want to say this again incredibly clear like i’m not saying i do this or support it i’m just saying i’m surprised it doesn’t exist but the moral of the story is most people are actually quite ethical and particularly if you’re in a room full of people they’re going to be extra ethical um and so i know i’m not surprised that they didn’t do that and i told you but as an owner i would have been like hey come here what uh yeah exactly i wouldn’t especially when i was like at a startup i act but i wouldn’t start if i have nothing to lose and i have everything but i wouldn’t say like tell me their numbers i would say like i would i would just be like what do they what motivates them um are they cool do they seem like they have their act together like these like fluffy questions and then okay i can say honestly i totally would have asked for their numbers i would have been like how big is it how much revenue are they doing i i was guessing you know 500 million is it 500 million you have to ask those other questions first you got to like see if they’re going to bite them you got to see if the person’s cool with it or not yeah you want to make them uncomfortable but i am a bit i am surprised um we uh you and i know someone who was involved in a lawsuit because they were hired at one company a large uh tech company and previously they had worked at the competitor and yeah we could we could say the names this is public information all right it was um anthony popliano he worked at facebook this is all public this is you can read the deposition or i believe it’s deposition he didn’t tell us i read i read the deposition like a nerd and that’s how i know yeah and basically according to the records that we read he worked at facebook he decided to work at snapchat and they said something like here’s a piece of paper write down the the organization chart tell us how it works and then go and recruit those people and he according to the uh deposition said no that’s i’m not a chance and they fired him snapchat did or or they like butted heads or something like that and uh so yeah i do yeah they putted heads over that yeah i i think this stuff happens actually a fair bit but i’m actually shocked it doesn’t happen more right i i thought my only concern in that situation would just be i don’t want to make my own person my teammate uncomfortable if they don’t feel like sharing they don’t they don’t want to share they feel like that’s wrong okay no problem then um but if they were down to share i would 100 be asking all the questions i’m thinking from my startup brain at a big company you sort of have more to lose it’s not really worth it uh you’re not like in a like sort of you know life or death situation of the company like you don’t need the information but i really have been surprised like we will hire people who are like from youtube or whatever and they and wherever we’re at we’re like hypothesizing like well you know like how do other companies handle this blah blah blah what can we try i’m like that dude worked there why don’t we just ask that guy like hey dude what did you guys do how did it work what was it like is this retention number good or bad relative to what you saw like and nobody asked the question which is like maybe it’s just not in the big big meeting settings but uh i have been surprised at that and i know if you’re working like overs there are other companies that don’t have that same credo i worked for a guy in indonesia my first first job i ever had it’s kind of like a summer job and my dad hooks me up with this guy he’s like oh yeah this guy is known as the king of coal in indonesia he owns like all the coal of indonesia i’m like oh sweet okay so i’m like i go do the summer job with this guy what’s it was he an american or an indonesian he’s a chinese guy living in indonesia a fifth grade dropout can’t speak like any english pretty much like very broken english um i he had four women just doing his email on giant tv screens in his office because i don’t think he could even type and uh he was just like or he would like uh orate like he’d just say out loud what he wants to reply to every email and uh and that’s how we do his business and so i like as i get there i’m like oh cool you’re the king of coal like how’d that happen what’d you do and what i realized pretty quickly was this guy’s entire business model was big companies like exxon and bp and chevron they all wanted land in indonesia and the land was owned by the local uh city province they had the rights to it so they so they had the thing and um the local guy would just only like the only way to do business with this guy was to bribe him like that’s the only thing the guy wanted was a bribe the local politician wanted a bribe if you give him the bribe you can have the land rights and this chinese indonesian guy was a politician no he was the guy he was the middle man so what he realized and then we i bought all the coal for two million in directly by this he’s like like well if they could they would but they can’t so they won’t and basically what he was saying like those companies did couldn’t get their hands dirty they could not risk bribing foreign like politicians so what they did was they let this guy bribe the follow-up foreign politicians get the rights and then they would cut a commercial deal with him and this guy knew nothing about the coal like i’d be like oh is this a good asset bad asset he’s like doesn’t matter we get the paper they pay for the paper like we don’t have to do any of the work we don’t have to like extract it mine it don’t have to do anything and now by the way this guy’s a jail like you know that’s the the end of the story is he’s in jail yeah his name well i i don’t wanna personal risk personal harm by outing this guy you know we’re a world away but but this guy’s kind of a gangster so i’m not gonna say his name you could you could use what i said in google basically your dad got you an internship with a gangster yeah me and my sister by the way both of us that’s crazy like i remember we were we were in his office one time and he had a friend come in and his friend is like kind of like you know when it’s his friend because it’s just like alcohol like starts pouring women start showing up at the office like what’s going on here who are you trying to wine and dine and it’s this one sleazy looking dude and i was like oh like what’s what’s your business he’s like i work in singapore i help companies on the singapore stock exchange and literally this was just straight insider trading so i’m sitting there and i’m just hearing this guy be like yeah these are the three companies you need to like buy they’re like dirt cheap right now but they’re gonna like they’re about to announce xyz and they’re gonna pop and then they would just like toast their whiskey and then they would buy this stock on the singapore stock exchange or hong kong stock exchange and like sure enough the numbers would go crazy and i was just sitting there being like wow this is like insanity that this is how like loosey-goosey these guys are with business well what i was gonna say i think that like in uh uh even though like people make amazon or whatever to be like evil you just said no like we would never even ask this ex-googler about x y and z and i was going to say that’s like a very american thing i’ve have a couple friends who i worked with who run chinese companies or you know they’re chinese and they’re either based in china or are now american or the chinese american now and i have a bunch of indian friends um and they’re like yeah we we don’t we operate differently than you our opinion of the right and wrong way is a lot different than you and it is far more unadulterated capitalism of just uh what why is copying wrong like and and they’re kind of right right like why is it wrong but in any way it is quite interesting yeah totally uh anyways i don’t know how we got you want to talk about the first versions uh we can go back to yeah what is i saw this website um my guy chris chris who’s my apprentice right now for content he sent this to me and i haven’t actually spent a ton of time on it but go to firstversions.com uh check that out and i’m pretty fascinated with this i think you are too we both are like internet archaeologists we like to go find the og thing what did i did this blog post i got like tens of thousands of views once uh before i had any audience it just went viral because it was what did the first web page look like for these 10 big companies and this is kind of like some common to to do uh like uber’s homepage back in the day snapchats home page back of the day the first facebook home page uh the first ebay homepage first amazon homepage and these things look like you know so basic and rudimentary and like really just it makes you realize like dude you you need to launch and there’s that quote if you’re not embarrassed by v1 of your product you launch too late and all these companies definitely like fall into that category so i thought firstversion.com was a cool little like archive of stuff like this i think this is so cool so i actually just sent you a link to an article that i wrote i think i wrote this in 16 2016 years ago uh 15 october 15. and i you could it probably doesn’t even work entirely but anyway i what i love to do and i’ve always loved doing this is i use there’s a few different websites web archives the easiest and what i like to do is i will [Music] get a google doc in a spreadsheet and i’ll map out the the whole journey of a company so i’ll look at where when airbnb started and then i’ll read all about them of like all right here’s when they announced they had this many users here were there here’s where they announced this much funding here’s where they said they had up their first 50 employees and then from 50 they actually went to a thousand in only two years and then i’ll take screenshots of their website and in doing that you can actually see what like how the the evolution so progression yeah and i’m just starting i’m just making this up with airbnb but it could be like it started as air betting breakfast and it was about renting cots inside of a living room and then oh wow they actually changed their their positioning to travel like a local and they started um taking higher end pictures i don’t know what it is but uh and when they started actually taking higher end pictures that was actually right when they right before they raised their 100 million dollar funding and so anyway you can actually track the progression really nicely by doing this and i love doing that i love it and so you can actually see oh uber ubercab.com they were only black car services oh when they raised all this money they actually got rid of the black car the black car became secondary so actually the black card didn’t work uh so they switched to this you know what i mean so it’s kind of cool yeah you can totally reverse engineer a lot of the stuff so some of the tools we use to do this the wayback machine which is the internet archive so uh just google wayback machine that lets you put in any domain name and you go back in time and they took screenshots of what the website looked like on june 12 20 2010 and then that you can go back you can see uber’s what did who uber’s homepage looked like back then how were they describing themselves another one i do is techcrunch i go to techcrunch i search for a company’s name and then i reverse sort it by the earliest mention of it so like you can go twitter you can see the very first article is you know mike arrington being like you know the buzz at the party this week uh was about twitter spelled without the you know without the vowels basically it’s like the short messaging service it was kind of fun you do do this but you know who cares you know people are just tweeting about there they’re just tweeting about their breakfast and it was all through sms like you could kind of see what was going on then so i like that one that’s that’s a useful one another one i’ll do is i’ll go on twitter and you can twitter advanced search so you can type in anyone’s name and you could do things like uh twitter doesn’t make this obvious how to do it there’s like a format of how you write these in but you write like at the sam par before 2011 and then you say minimum 300 likes and i can kind of go see your most popular post at that point in time what were you talking about what was working for you what wasn’t so i’ve done this with a whole bunch of people and i kind of like i really am a big reverse engineer type of guy it’s not that you can copy it but it’s just data points it’s a way to fast-forward experience because experience the hard way is slow it takes like decades to get good at things and to learn and to like figure out what’s normal what’s not what’s fast what’s slow what’s good what’s bad and a better way to do it is to like download a whole bunch of data points quickly and it’s not perfect experience but it’s better than being blind and just kind of going off only your personal experience so there’s some ways i would actually go as far to say you can copy it um you you can you actually can copy a lot of stuff and i think you should sometimes so for example this first by the way firstversions.com this is a wonderful website this is such a good website uh i uh this is so cool um i wish they don’t by the way what they do is not just internet like what like what we’re talking about is home pages because that’s like kind of our niche but they’ll be like this is the yeah this is the first version of tom and jerry like the very first pilot and like last night i don’t know why for a reason before i went to bed i was watching the very first pilot episode of curb your enthusiasm before it was even a show and i was i just love seeing that og og the first pilot of always sunny in philadelphia where they’re using the handheld camera like i like seeing that because it just as somebody who is frequently starting things it’s important to go see that your favorite things started with very humble simple kind of shitty beginnings uh and then you know you sort of can see how much better they got over time this is so good uh i love this uh i’m gonna link you some uh link something to you so in 2013 i created this thing i called uh the ceo doc it was a stupid name but uh i i sent it to you and you can actually see that it’s so funny that you do this because i mean we’re it’s it’s so funny that we’re similar and we’ve been doing this for so i created oh wait is it not working um i created this document where i would take i think i had a list of 500 people and i would make timelines for each of their lives and i would say started their it was broken into apprenticeships first hit and then the self-actualization mode so for example uh jack dorsey started apprenticeship at age 22 from 22 to 28 he basically was like this poor nobody who worked as a dispatch service for taxi cab company 28 to 31 started twitter at 28 uh it actually became a pretty big hit really soon at uh 29 and so i have timelines and i have average ages a average age for each person and so um i love doing that stuff and it works so good uh for for just seeing like what’s possible right so we’re actually quite similar uh i’ve been doing this as well for a while yeah it’s great to nerd out about this kind of stuff um okay so first versions is cool i have another kind of cool thing okay here’s a here’s an idea i would say this is not a business it’s probably a very bad idea maybe this is something that this is you reminded me of it because this thing that we’re doing is uh like the thing we’re talking about is extremely nerdy and probably most people don’t don’t do what we’re describing like kind of like go back and map out the evolution of companies or people or whatever it is so similarly i i want a tool that i’m calling business pocket so pocket is this chrome extension it’s this app or service where you like if you see an article you like but you don’t have time to read it you just hit pocket and it’s like you put it in your pocket for later do you think i think it used to be called read it later you think pocket is going well i bet you it’s going pretty badly i bet you that’d be a cool company to buy yeah i don’t think it’s going well it got really big and it raised a bunch of money and then like it’s just been around for so long without like an exit that you wonder did it just get like become obsolete somehow um along the way but anyways it was just a way to save articles now i actually want something what i’ll call business pocket so i have this bookmark thing in my chrome that’s called companies to watch it’s based like any time i stumble across a company i find it interesting i’ve been doing it it’s like this thing is like 10 years old now i find an interesting company and before it used to be i want to see if this will be successful or maybe i should if i was an investor i would invest in this so i want to like flag this and then i’ll come back later in three years and i’ll see how it turned out whether i would have made money or lost money on this thing and so i’ve just been collecting this for a long time now in reality i hit i bookmark it and then i like never go back and go recheck those because who’s got the time but um i would love a service that’s almost like a programmatic newsletter where i can just flag either people or companies that i say i want to keep a watch i want to keep watch on this company or this this this individual and um like the ceo or maybe this company the startup and then i wanted to like basically take the 10 that i’ve flagged and send me anytime there’s interesting news about them with some filter like you know they raise new funding they got a new job they they they announced this thing they’re on tv whatever and um and you know my 12 that i’m tracking might be different than the 12 that you’re tracking but like we might have three that are the same and so this company that’s underneath that would just need to set up like a kind of like a programmatic way to like watch for the news around certain names and then turn it into an automated newsletter that was kind of just like a random idea i don’t think it’s a business but i think it would be i disagree i think it’s a business when we were getting ready to decide if we wanted to launch trends or watch launch something new i wrote a landing page for this product i forget what i called it but something involving the word spy and i put like the headline was like we’re your secret spy spies that track your competitors and tell you everything that they do so you and we deliver to you via email and uh i think this actually could have worked wonderfully and the reason i came up with this idea was i had a friend who worked at rocket internet rocket internet google it it’s a it’s a guy it’s three brothers uh named ali alex and something else samware brothers and they started this thing called rocket internet and basically the way it works right now it’s a large publicly traded company they had this like guy named he was like the chief scientist and what they would do is they would research fast growing companies in america and they would clone them and they would deploy that company in africa in asia different parts of europe things brazil and so they cloned uber but in mexico they cloned pinterest but for germany they cloned zappos but for germany they did um amazon for time they owned like the amazon for brazil i think yeah and they also owned the amazon for thailand and they would pick a variety of companies they would do like the wayfarer for nigeria or something like that and they had this guy who’s who was called the chief scientist and all the clones of the amazon of this country that country that country there’d probably be like eight clones and he would send an email every day this is the story i heard i don’t know if it’s true he would send an email every day and it’d be like hey everyone amazon uh actually just moved on their homepage they moved the clothing from uh eight pic or a hundred pixels to the left uh it probably means that clothing is a little bit more popular now than furniture so all right make sure you move your clothing thing or hey they uh they changed their color of this button from this yellow to this orange go ahead and do that and i thought that’s pretty awesome i would love to have that i would love to track my competitors because i would do research on my competitors i would say oh which ads are they using oh i wonder why they’re using this ad maybe maybe they’re using this ad for this one this reason that reason and that reason i’m gonna go and copy it and i would use a variety of similar web uh facebook ad archive uh aha refs and a few other things and i would i would just i would like oh here’s where they’re succeeding and here’s why they’re succeeding i may copy them i may not copy them and i just i just know what’s working and i think that that 100 could be a service that you pay a hundred grand a year for and you get and you and they’ll tell you the five nearest competitors and every month you meet with their team and you say all right your competitors they’re doing this they’re doing that they’re doing this here’s what’s working here’s what’s not working right here’s a higher pi hypothesis hypothesis as to what what all this means and i think actually you could charge a six-figure annual contract for all of it and i think it would be a really cool company right yeah i told you about my friend who i i nudged in this direction to do this for for e-commerce uh i’ll give him another shout out here he said he got a bunch of sales last time i mentioned it so i’ll do it again shopify sales data.com basically a way to track your competitors um who and how much they’re selling and what new ads they’re running and stuff and um just in the niche of e-commerce and it’s you know i don’t know 100 bucks a month or something like that and um i paid for it i’m like this is a great uh you know it’s a valuable service and so you could do it in a niche or you could do it you know more broadly but uh but yeah i think that’s cool um let’s give you a different topic you want to do one more did you want to do the pets thing you’ve had that here for two weeks um so this is actually like a really what i thought was a really random idea and then i saw an ad i saw a commercial for it on tv yesterday and it’s like totally a thing so it’s just going to sound stupid because it was like a stupid basically i was like uh kids love having pets pets are like a pain in the ass maintenance wise and your kid wants it but they’re not going to maintain it i was thinking about like that’s why people get fish because it’s kind of like self-contained in this little tank and you don’t have to do anything most the time just feed it a fish die all the time it’s really sad for the kid and so i was like why is there not just like ai pets why aren’t they just like robo pets um for kids and i was like oh a fish would work because it just needs to swim around sort of aimlessly you don’t touch it so even if it was mechanical it wouldn’t feel cold like a mechanical dog i don’t think will feel great but um dude that is you know mechanical fish you you hit home runs this is such a dud this is such a dud you you’re a home run hitter today’s a strikeout this is a stupid stupid idea you are well i saw the commercial before it was called robo fish yesterday and i was like oh this exists no way oh my gosh so i’m going to go check everybody see if you can see does robo i think it’s called robo fish i saw the commercial tell me to do 100 million dollars a year and prove that this is not a dud so anyways that was one and then there’s a related one which is there’s a medical thing that’s going on for you know like pets are sometimes labeled as like kind of like a emotional support dog or whatever it’s like anti-anxiety that sort of thing you know that’s total [ ] too right well i know most people use it for [ ] i don’t know if there’s any medical like uh like there must be some like cases where it helps or something like that no i agree that in some cases it is true but um a lot of like like people like oh they’re certified and emotional like there’s not like a certification process yeah there’s no yeah exactly this dog did not get trained um but but anyways i saw this company that was doing this with for for people with dementia and alzheimer’s they were giving them this weighted it’s the equivalent of a weighted blanket but it’s a pet so it’s a pet that sits in your lap it’s heavy and like a weighted blanket but it feels like a pet and it moves like a pet now if you’re like totally if you’re just like an adult who’s has no health conditions you’ll be like oh this is like clearly a robot this blink is like not really fully natural and you know this dog’s obviously not running anywhere it’s not a real pet but to somebody with you know dementia or alzheimer’s they found that this like is extremely comforting to them now they’re really expensive right now uh they’re like thousands of dollars for this like really kind of like realistic feeling thing what’s it called but um but they’re gonna bring the price down i don’t know i met this guy who um through my wife she she was consulting for this company that was doing it and she was showing me the videos and stuff like that about this thing so i thought that was kind of cool too but i think that we will see more and more either genetically engineered pets or just straight up kind of like mechanical ai pets because if you can get sixty percent of the benefits with zero percent of the work and maintenance i think there’s a whole class of people who take that trade um that today just don’t own pets because it’s just too much cost and too much work so man i called your thing totally stupid i think for the average oh yeah hold on receipts come in and tell sam tell sam about the robo face i mean i don’t know if this is what you were talking about but this company in 2012 they sold 15 million of these at eight bucks a piece in their first year well first year that’s right all right i i’m both i kind of take back and i don’t take that so you’re wrong in that you’re saying like oh pets are so annoying just give them a robot pet like yeah i think that’s actually silly i don’t doubt that people buy a robo fish i think that’s just like a cute little widget that’s fun to have dude you were the one who was like oh these ai girlfriends are great uh it’s the same idea it’s the same premise okay well look i’m open-minded enough to like uh challenge my views but i you started talking about this alzheimer’s thing and that’s actually quite interesting i just googled it i wanted to see which ads come up i like because like so i googled this thing i’m i it’s kind of i don’t really like looking at this i feel a little sleazy but there’s this oh i actually don’t like the name there’s a name called i just sent it to the alls all store so alz store and it stands for the alzheimer’s store and they call it the all store and they sell um like these live strong bands that have your name on it so if you can when you forget your name remember and they actually have a robotic therapy dog and this website actually looks like it’s like a entrepreneur who’s just looking for a money-making niche which a little weird with with this type of thing but people seem to love it it’s a whole dedicated to alzheimer’s products i have zero idea if this is like actually what alzheimer’s patients love and need but this is incredibly fascinating and i’m looking at their similar web traffic no i actually think this is legit they have videos of them of the founder talking on like the today’s show about selling all types of products for alzheimer’s stuff and i’m looking at their uh similar web traffic and it’s incredibly popular what a fascinating business all about alzheimer’s yeah i know this is a legit uh company i’m looking at the about page this they have a good background story of the the father has alzheimer’s so now they create all these products it looks pretty interesting can you believe that this exists the all store right that’s wild i had no idea um but makes sense i guess uh i guess that does make sense i have one more can i do last two minutes billy of the week story um the second billy of the week story i learned this i tweeted this thing i tweeted this out and it kind of this kind of blew my mind okay so i was doing some you know shoe dog is like super popular about the founding story of nike yeah you did one on adidas i did one on adidas and as i was okay nike great uh what’s the story with adidas where did that come from and so i just started googling for a second and i didn’t go so in-depth but okay here is the 60-second version of adidas so fir uh tell me if you knew these things just give me a yay or an a if you knew it or not so adidas when you were a kid did you not hear that this stood for all day i dream about sports yeah soccer all day i dream about soccer soccer yeah yeah that’s right not true uh basically you know the guy’s name was adolf dossler who started it and he went by adi dossler dude uh so it’s just adidas i was in germany one time and someone a german was like do you like adidas i’m like i don’t know what that is like a german brand they’re like oh no it’s adidas you don’t know adidas goes no i’ve never heard of it and they started laughing at me that’s adidas i guess yeah right i’m sure you corrected him i was about his own hometown oh you’ve been taking this yeah i know that’s not i don’t know adidas so okay so the story is kind of crazy so uh two brothers basically dad owns a leather shoe factory the two sons are like okay shoes are cool but we want to do sports shoes not these like leather shoes and so they spin out and they create the dossler brothers shoe factory and what they do is they’re like we’re gonna you know adi you’re gonna design the shoes and uh rudy you’re gonna sell the shoes you do sales and marketing two brothers they do that right uh it’s like a ten-year grind you know building this thing up they’re growing but they’re growing slowly and then finally 1936 the olympics come to germany and um they are a whole bunch of the athletes from germany are wearing adidas but they also get a little bit you know they go and they hustle and they get their adidas shoes in the hands of some non-german athletes also one of whom is jesse owens jesse owens goes on to win i think four gold medals at those olympics and so jesse this is a black guy who basically wins gold and beats the germans in front of hitler who’s like promoting white supremacy at the time and so it’s you know a big deal for for that victory um at the time he’s wearing adidas and this is kind of considered the first time that an entrepreneur used sports to promote their products or their businesses and he kept doing this right like you see photos of ollie versus frasier they’re both wearing adidas because he was like hell-bent on getting adidas into the hands of all the iconic athletes that they could which nike went and took that strategy and did even better with that strategy over time um and so they you know business is going great that you know after that olympics thing where they get all this exposure next three years they sell like i don’t know 600 000 pairs of shoes business is great uh you know 1940 hits and world war world war ii starts and the factory just gets seized by the german military they’re like this is now a war factory we need to produce war goods here no more shoes and hey you two brothers join the army so they they get enrolled in the army so the business just goes on break adidas just like goes out of business for the whole world war okay world war ii ends the brothers come back uh you know andy’s like all right he gets 50 people together he’s like we’re restarting the factory we’re going to do this again and somewhere along the way the two brothers break up so i didn’t know this part yeah i know that the other brother goes on to start puma yeah and so one brother starts adidas the other brother starts puma which i just thought was like you know the most baller [ ] you knew that already yeah i know that they got an argument well known yeah uh well i don’t know but i mean you’re talking to me uh i think that uh yeah they got into an argument one of them started puma for some reason i thought that he he like did he move to africa and start puma is there any part of that no i think he like literally moved across the river and like started a competing factory within like earshot that’s that’s the way i read it maybe i read that wrong yeah i knew and and the two brothers because they got into a disagreement on how to do oh uh bray said reebok started in africa so i guess i’m getting confused but uh yeah yeah i knew that so they they restart the factory after the war and now they’re using all the war like leftover war materials in the shoes like rubber for the souls and like certain design like the look of camouflage and different things like that they come up with the three stripe logo and so anyways business does good and then like there’s this crazy run of death so the puma brother dies four years later the adi dies you know from adidas he dies his wife takes over she dies six years later the sun takes over he dies three years later so this is like this run of early deaths it’s like you know the defensive against the dark arts position nobody can like hold this thing and so that finally now the two daughters have owned the thing they sell it for pennies on the dollar because adidas has just been declining for years now at this point you know they didn’t have the right people running it i guess and so they sell it for 500 million dollars um uh you know to this french guy french guy tries to turn around he can’t do it it’s on the verge of bankruptcy and then they sell it to this guy this is the actually the billy of the week uh it’s this guy dreyfus and um i think his name is robert dreyfuss oh do you know who you know who this person’s related to right no uh his dad was rich but i don’t know why he’s rich uh i believe it’s elaine from seidenfelp that’s her uh uh julia dreyfuss yes i believe uh i believe that’s her grandpa wow okay that’s crazy so this guy grows up kind of rich goes to like harvard or whatever uh buys this thing his tagline i love it he goes i’m a gambler and i like turnarounds that was kind of like his business philosophy so he takes a gamble takes the lead role at adidas and he basically is like all right we’re doing three things we’re moving the factory to asia we’re cutting the payroll we’re cutting jobs cutting two-thirds of the jobs in this company so we can get profitable and lastly we’re gonna take that money we were spending on people and we’re gonna spend a [ __ ] ton of it on marketing and you know they were like wow you know you took it from the brink of bankruptcy three percent market share and it came roaring back and became the number two brand how’d you do it you know you must be a genius and he goes you know he was in time magazine the quote is it didn’t take a genius you just had to look at what nike and reebok were doing and do that he goes it was just easier for somebody outside the company to see what was obvious than somebody inside the company who had all this baggage and they couldn’t do it and uh you know so he he turns it around retires a billionaire you know in his 50s i think and uh and that is you know the crazy story of adidas today i thought that was wild i had no idea so there’s two takeaways of this for me um the first is a question that i should start asking myself and and you don’t actually need follow through but how would a pe firm run your company i actually think that’s a great question to ask yourself which is what would a pe firm do if they were if they owned this right now and that’s kind of an interesting way to get ideas because you kind of say to yourself oh man i’m being such a punk like i could be so much better the second thing and and the opposite and the opposite would be what would you know larry page do groups of google’s you know ceo and founder or doc um yeah like but yeah they took this small thing and they just kept expanding it like no we need to do google x we need to do moonshot projects self-driving cars you know satellites into the sky giving people internet like they had like unbridled you know ambition and were like what if you just like blew the top off this thing in ambition and then the other one is the pe the ruthless operator way what would they do i think both are valuable questions for your business and the second thing and this is actually something that i’ve been thinking a lot about because i’ve been thinking about louis vuitton uh not that i don’t even own one louis vuitton thing i’m never gonna own all the louis vuitton thing but it’s pretty fascinating that i in my head i stereotyped fashion brands it’s just like trendy and and they they’re gonna come and go like uh but in reality it i would bet that some of these fashion brands like adidas puma louis vuitton they’re actually some of the longest lasting companies i imagine i could think of and that’s pretty fascinating that a brand like adidas that went through near bankruptcy went through multiple owners is still relevant in kicks ass and that’s actually pretty cool to create something that can last that long and uh right it’s kind of cool i think that’s actually inspiring that something uh with withstood all nonsense like it succeeded in spite of especially in fashion especially in fashion where everybody wants to do it and fashion like literally is kind of like in and out of fashion it’s like a fad type of uh type of business where things go in and out of style so quickly so just to last there is pretty impressive what i’m saying is there’s some stuff that it just it has lasted for many many decades so uh louis vuitton luggage i i imagine existed at the turn of the century in the 1900s same with um the uh um right now i’m wearing nike cortez i just looked at the uh the website that we were talking about earlier first versions and the first version of nike was the nike cortez and i’m still wearing the same damn model and it’s kind of interesting and inspiring to create something that can last 50 100 200 years and uh that’s kind of a cool part that’s how i feel about like altoids or coca-cola yeah i guess you could do it i mean you can do it a lot more than fashion but there are a bunch of fashion brands that have done it successfully and i think that’s pretty damn cool you know like uh rolex or tiffany’s diamonds or something it’s kind of neat i put my all in never looking back