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 they they find um a bunch of burner cell phones they find like a bag of like 50 000 of cash they find a bunch of like the hardware wallets that had the bitcoins in them and then they found like folders on their computer that were like fake passport ideas and like like places to go places to run away like they found like folders that said that [ ] on their computers [Music] i don’t even entirely understand what happened but i have a backstory about three people today’s edition of the milk road you will get the full backstory and 10 bullet points yeah you need to go earlier so but but we did bullet point and what so here’s what happened 2016 this crypto exchange called bitfinex got hacked and at the time i think like 120 000 bitcoin got stolen that was like 70 million dollars got stolen and it was like it was bad uh that was like a big hack the price of bitcoin that week dropped by 40 so it was like it caused like this huge uh you know like uh a fear shock in the market but the thing about bitcoin is bitcoin is on a public ledger right like it’s a it’s a public blockchain so everybody could see the coins everybody saw oh the coins are in this wallet and and so all the other exchanges were like look this is bad for the industry we will try to prevent like if that wallet tries to cash this out we won’t let them cash out uh the money so for many years that money kind of just sat in those wallets or was moving in like really small small transactions back and forth between like a web of wallets clearly somebody was trying to like launder the money essentially they were trying but but how how did he how did they even get out of the first place so i don’t know i don’t know what the exploit was that let them hack the accounts and they didn’t hack all the accounts on bitfinex they actually just hacked like some of the whale accounts so they were able to take 120 000 bitcoin from not all the accounts and the funny thing is that biffinx didn’t have the money to like make those users whole so what they did was they they reduced everybody on bit fedex’s balance by 33 or something to like balance it out so i’m like hor like imagine if your bank did that that would be like insane i’d be like oh they robbed that guy’s vault and you’re taking my money away to like even it out for everybody like no thank you um so anyways it was bad and there’s a reason why biff next is not like you know the biggest exchange now um so anyways that the money kind of sat there now fast forward five and a half years go by last week people start to notice bigger transactions coming from the uh the bitfinex hack wallets um and so they’re like there’s these alerts on twitter like whale alert well it’s like the coins are moving the coins are moving hundred thousand dollars a million dollars the coins are moving 10 million whatever and so um and so the fed go are not the fed sorry department of justice goes kicks down a door in new york into this this this husband and wife couple’s house and they look like you know your complete like average joe clean cut like you would this is not like you know doesn’t look like a grimy criminal mastermind operation uh and i’ll explain a little bit more about that in a second the funny bit about that uh but basically they seize uh like their computers they they find um a bunch of burner cell phones they find like a bag of like fifty thousand dollars of cash they find a bunch of like the hardware wallets that had the bitcoins in them and then they found like folders on their computer that were like fake passport ideas and like and um and they seized three and a half billion dollars worth of bitcoin because the price of bitcoin’s gone up so much so that 70 million has become three and a half billion dollars worth and so these guys were trying to launch they don’t think these are the hackers but they were trying to launder that money they may have been the hackers they don’t know that’s not proven but they were trying to launder the money and the the doj had been like if you’ve seen that meme of charlie from it’s always anywhere they have like the cork board and he’s like trying to like find that find the the crime or solve the crime that’s what they had been doing because they had this web of all these wallets and finally they found that oh it’s trying to cash out in this wallet owned by this guy ilya dutch liechtenstein or whatever but how how did what what type of idiot would use this well eventually you need to get the money so the problem is like they were trying to get the money out through like walmart gift cards they were buying like 500 walmart gift cards with bitcoin they were doing like playstation games they were like they were trying all these small things but they could never move the bulk of the money so if you want to move like in mass you got to do something that had that lets you move size and usually those could you buy an nft and then sell it no well eventually you need to get the money out of the wallet that’s the problem so so so the problem so in order to do that there’s like an off-ramp right how do you get it into you know us dollars for example if that’s what you wanted to do um you know he left it there for five and a half years and they were probably living off and spending in some ways but like you wanted to actually like get a lot of it out and get get it uh remove the paper trail of the blockchain you need to get it as an off-ramp but to get as an off-ramp you have like a you know your id like these exchanges they require you to upload your license and like they have laws they have to comply with called kyc know your customer and so eventually they found that somehow the doj they didn’t explain exactly but they they identified that the money was moving towards a wallet that was owned by a known person that’s how they ended up finding these guys now the funny part is that’s awesome so that well so the i when i read about this i was like wait that name sounds so familiar both their names sound familiar so the guy his name is ilya i-l-y-a i think it was like a very like weird name his last name was lichtenstein so he spoke at the first hustle con i never talked to him but um he had a company called mix rank which was just a normal startup went through yc and he spoke at hustlecon and then his girlfriend or wife she was a copywriter and i remember talking a little bit with her because she her name’s heather morgan i think and she had a um a website all about writing sales emails totally is that right remember before the hack did it like a red dress she had like a linkedin post on like five hacks for your your cover letter for your job interview like you know like that sort of thing and so yeah she was doing that she and so they and the funny thing is like the reason the internet kind of went crazy with it was because here you had two very unlikely characters so um we had a bunch of friends text us or text me because i was writing this this edition of the milk road and i was like um anybody know this guy and you you knew him but some other people knew him they’re like dude you would never get vibes of like this guy might just go launder billions of dollars like smart like kind of like like his engineer type uh he like showed very little emotion no i did not think that this guy like yeah and and in her she’s like this like super strange kanye west level weird uh you know like person she basically she had like an alter ego that was called razzle and razzlecon was her rap name and then she has like these super [ ] cringy rap songs on youtube like dude okay i have you know i have you know i think it’d be cool to be a rapper but if i hear myself there’s no way i’m publishing that because it sounds so bad you better win come real far but don’t know where i’m heading [ ] crocodile of wall street silver on my fingers and boots on my feet and so uh it’s horrible it’s so bad that the top comment was paris hilton i’m gonna prove to everyone that you could have uh that having money means you can rap good and then it said heather morgan hold my beer i don’t even know pearson has like a rap song so yeah yeah there’s just like she’s like one of the strangest characters like i watched i went deep dude for this i was writing this thing and i was like oh let me get some examples and then i couldn’t look away because like the the train wreck dude it’s like there’s videos so uncomfortable and like she she forced everybody to like they built like this golden mini taj mahal that she sat in and then her bridesmaids lifted it up on her shoulder and brought her in but even though the audience at her wedding is like uncomfortably clapping like off-beat because they’re like uh this is this normal there’s like there’s like clearly only 14 people in the room and then she does a rap performance at the wedding that was like equally cringey and she’s just like humping the air oh my god to the guy iliad when he goes dude this freaking guy uh i’m looking at these pictures that’s hilarious this woman’s really hard to look at she’s just friends she’s that should have been her wrapping cringe city that would have been like okay i get it you’re gonna be the cringiest cool uh that’s like henry cejudo the king of cringe uh yeah that’s what she should have done like it is super strange but um but yeah basically they recovered it and so now what’s gonna happen anyways there’s a bunch of interesting little bits to it so the doj is gonna give the money back to bitfinex it looks like bitfinex had when they they launched their own token at one point time called the leo token that’s like used in their if you trade in their exchange it’ll give you a discount using the leo token so they had to put it a thing when they launched a leo token was like hey if we ever recover anything from that hack um we’ll use 80 up to 80 of it to buy back and burn our leo token which will cause like the price you know leo holders to benefit from if we ever recover from this and so now they’re gonna get like three and a half billion dollars to buy back so the price of leo token shot up like whatever sixty percent in 24 hours because people are like oh wow that’s gonna be a lot but they said we’re not gonna just cause a bunch of cell pressure in the market we’re gonna do a controlled sale over like a multi-year period um so that it’s like scheduled and doesn’t like affect the bitcoin market or whatever um god this is such a good story this would make this is exactly that’s what everyone was saying is like here comes you know incoming incoming netflix doc have you seen this i saw i just watched this clip like every day for the past three days and it just absolutely cracks me up i was hoping ben can uh play it in the thing but i don’t think it’ll work i don’t think the sound will come through so have you seen this clip of this interview of bill gates back in the day jumping over a chair yeah have you seen this yeah wait like just the normal one of him jumping just so he’s doing some interview with some woman about microsoft and she goes she goes is it true that you can leap over a chair is that that impressive he goes well first of all it is impressive for bill gates to be able to do that second of all just i don’t know why this is being talked about and then he goes so she goes is it true that you could jump over a chair and he goes it depends on the size of the chair so you know just like then the cuts it’s like a hard cut to a chair and the milk it’s clearing it is it true that you can leap over a chair from a standing position it depends on the size of the chair i’ll cheat a little bit yeah that’s an old clip you’ve just now seen that i no i came back into my life because i was thinking uh somebody said something like oh yeah you know back in the day or you know in the good old days somebody said some phrase like that and in my head i go what are they even thinking about when they when they say that and i go i’m gonna have i was like what’s the funniest back of the day thing and i that clip came to mind and so i decided anytime somebody says back in the day or or you know in the good old days i’m gonna think only of that moment where bill gates says depends on the depends on how i had the chair i always just think of uncle rico the uncle rico clipping napoleon dynamite where he goes i used to be able to throw a pig skin over them mountains all right so listen i did something that i did not think i was ever going to do um so last year in 2021 or no uh 2020 whenever covet happened i launched this course that i i don’t even know if i ever talked about it called the ideation boot camp i did it with gagan i invested in this company just like you did in maven you have already done two of them i think and you have a third coming up i decided to launch one i launched one the other day i only talked about it on twitter i’ve not talked about it on here yet but so if people want to do it it’s called the ideation bootcamp and it’s basically my research my research framework and how i research stuff it’s but it’s uh you go to maven.com so maven how do you say how do you like you say maven it rhymes with like raven uh yeah there you go with an m but with the m at the end no no that’s right that’s right yeah and you could see my name is on the front page but what they don’t have yet and this is what i told gagan they so me and sean both invested in this company and as part of investing in it he made us promise to do courses yeah um which was actually a good kick in the ass because now i actually had to do it and it has been fun but um he needs like custom urls he doesn’t have that yet oh yeah yeah it’s like maven.com blank slash whatever in order to get to your thing but i just have they made it for me they made a powerwriting powerwritingcourse.com they’re but they have to make it for you but i’m doing this thing it i think it’s gonna be pretty badass i think i’ll continue doing it maybe once a year but maybe i won’t ever do it i don’t know give an example so give a teaser of like okay so so this is about coming up with a great idea figuring out so coming up with ideas and then picking the ones that seem like better ideas and worst ideas in a short amount of time is that the hook yeah i’ll give one old example so basically when trends launched i wrote this article about plants and i’m like man i think someone could build like an online nursery or an online plant business and the reason why i came up with that idea is i read the annual report for 1-800 flowers and they said the of and 100 flowers the big company does a billion or something in revenue so they’ve got a large perspective and they said that our fastest growing segment is millennials buying succulents online this is growing like crazy and then i looked on at their financials and it looked like the majority of the profit came from people buying accessories so chocolate or fancy pots and i’m like well there’s a [ ] idea you make succulents and you make it like really cool pots that are artists and you like figure out what the contribution margin is and then what alex said about what did alex say yesterday in the podcast like opportunity of value or value of opportunity like he like phrased it actually better than i phrased it historically but basically you could do a bunch of math it’s really like simple arithmetic and you’re like in order to get your repeat purchase rate the total adjustable market times your contribution margin and like that’s how you can come up with a good idea in that space just off that one insight and so that’s an example so i just list out all like my frameworks and how i research and it started with reading the reading the annual report for 100 flowers which uh that sounds like the most you know kind of unique starting point for finding not even just finding specific opportunities but just like training your brain to think about the world wider than the way you currently think about it that’s that’s how i would phrase it because like i don’t think you’d necessarily find the best ideas by being like okay i’m gonna go read you know the heart the hbs business school in the harvard business schools annual report and in there i’m gonna find a business idea i think that’s a little too hardcore no the way it works is you have this general thing so this general thing is basically what’s this combination of things that i’m interested in things that i’m good at and things that can make money all right i know what that general i think is i’m going to go to very particular places to find information that’s going to help guide this and what it’s going to do is going to help me find a handful of problems that i’m interested in solving and these problems for sure have demand for them i’ll give you an example of this how this played out in my life so i invest in this company the guy actually came to our podcast our live podcast show in san francisco which was live in your office very so you know it was a very small crew maybe 50 people 75 people something like that i don’t know what it was but it was the very first live thing we ever did and um this guy comes up afterwards and he’s uh hey that was great um and i’m like what are you cool what’s your story what do you do and he’s like oh i’m i currently run the perception team on the self-driving cars division of uber um he was very charming very good looking i was sold too handsome guy ver very confident so he wasn’t like hey sean can i just pitch you my idea i’d really just want to tell you like that that’s always like uh sure man uh you talk while i think of a way to escape is usually how that conversation goes and so this was different this guy was you know he i was genuinely interested then he started saying things and then i was like oh so he’s like yeah but i’m leaving to work on my own startup okay what is it uh what is it uber artificial intelligence guy you know like a guy who works on the ai team at uber and so he was starting his own self-driving car company and he’s like you know here’s what we’re gonna do we’re focusing on he’s like you know it’s funny i i was you know i was looking at what we were doing at uber and he was like what stood out what jumped out to me this is kind of like one of your ideation things it’s like sometimes some a stat will come out and um at twitch the ceo emmett he used to call the he used to say sometimes you look at data not for a specific answer but just to find something that makes you go huh or like that’s weird it can’t be right can it and um and so he used to the ceo and he used to mention like you don’t always go looking do it write a sequel query just to get a specific answer sometimes you just browse until something jumps out at you as being like not what you not on trend and so anyways this guy had said 75 of all um uber rides are like you know one passenger going less than it was like 60 60 something percent go or one passenger and 60 were going less than three miles so it’s like short trips of just one person inside of a dense city and he’s like you know so it’s kind of crazy right we have this like four person maybe six percent six-seater car that weighs thousands of tons with a with one driver driving one person one mile like that seems inefficient and so he was trying to create a new vehicle that was like a one-person vehicle one or two-person vehicle that was electric and self-driving and optimized for very short trips and i was like oh that’s really cool anyways i invest 50 000 bucks you fast forward like a year and uh you know he’s like grinding away in this garage in san mateo uh trying to get a car to drive itself and i would go down to he was working literally out of a storage unit so i would go to a storage container like kind of a what’s it called like uh like public storage public storage yeah literally and then he’d roll up the garage on like unit 333 or whatever and then he’d put me in it he’d be like all right let’s see if it works and then we drive in a circle around the storage facility a storage like a parking lot and it was like whoa that was bizarre to sit there and just like it was thing driving me yeah so it was working but it was very you know like that’s a closed environment it’s pretty easy to get that to work but he was working on okay now let’s take it out a mile okay now let’s go get a sandwich from the shop and like that’s what he was doing for like a year so anyways you at the time the idea the initial idea was like to be kind of like an uber competitor right like somebody will just push a button this ride will show up roll up to them with no driver inside they hop in they actually drive themselves to the location then they leave they just walk out and the thing will drive to the next passenger by itself i was like that’s really cool idea we were trying to figure it out and i felt like we were hitting a wall and this is where something like your course will help because if you’re oh if you’re if all your ideas are boxed into your own life experiences and you’re like a you know 27 year old engineer who’s worked at you know tech companies like your life experiences are pretty narrow and only once we got out of that and started like figuring out these little you know like these these these unique spots like when you when you read an annual report you go huh so i was reading an annual report uh we talked to we just took a random meeting we took a random meeting with some transportation lawyer and he mentioned that he does work for this company and i looked up that company and it’s basically like this i don’t know like 30 billion dollar company that i’ve never heard of and what did it do they partner with like 15 cities and they go to the city and they say hey um you need buses and scooters and ferries and trains and all that stuff yeah you just commission us we’ll bid for your for the right to run transportation in your city and they would get and so this the whole 30 billion dollar company or whatever was like off of like 15 city contracts and then i thought about i was like oh of course like san francisco doesn’t run their own buses like you know or whatever not every city is going to want to be in the transportation business they just contracted out to some vendor and i was like man that’s an amazing business because that vendor now has lock-in like the city’s not going to change so they’re just going to like they just get to eat up they have a monopoly on city transport and then that got me thinking about those city bike share programs if you’ve seen those city bikes awesome and then their annual reports were online and i went and i read about it and city bike did the same model they went to new york and they built like 100 million dollar revenue business doing city bikes in new york and they were the only ones who had the license to do it and they did it in san francisco and then they sold to lyft for i don’t know some hundreds of millions of dollars and i thought that’s a really cool model and so then we started brainstorming dude could you go to a city that needs this type of transport like a different type of transport than what they already have with their buses and whatever and just say we’ll be the vendor for you that’s exactly what they did they went to las vegas did it work uh yeah well i haven’t talked to him recently but yeah they got a contract basically with las vegas where the city was like yeah we have this thing called a transportation desert it’s like a place where our routes don’t really go but a lot of people need to go in this area and they’re complaining to us about it so you know yeah we’ll pay you guys we’ll we’ll pre-buy you know like quarter million dollars of rides from you um and so it’s like instead of trying to get half a quarter million people to download your app like uber yeah whatever you’ve got one city official to say i’ll buy 250 000 worth of rides and that’ll last us a few months and we’ll see how that goes and that’s what you and i do to people so because we just study and break down stuff i think you you and i go through the same discovery and aha moment i hope that our audience does which is basically you see it once you know what’s possible or once you know like what other people is possible your standard of what’s possible kind of changes and you’re like well of course i could do that they did that and they did by doing this this and this i already know exactly how they did it it’s like um it would kind of be like me telling you well just go get big muscles it’s like i don’t i can’t get big muscles like i don’t know what that means versus like well just lift this weight do it four times a week and and here i’ll remind you every single time and you can do it it’s like when you know like a specific routine or you know what’s possible it definitely changes your perspective on what you should be doing and uh hopefully that’s what the podcast does but that’s what the course will be doing but uh i don’t know i wanted to go sign up maven.com maven.com they’ll see your face they’ll see my face and it’s called the it’s cool and then you have one too on the i it’s called the ideation boot camp you have one too the the power writing course this is your third time doing it my third time doing it yeah and you did it because you’re like uh people liked it i think god said that you have the second highest rated course yeah yeah i forget who had number one you know uh second place is the best place uh would they still have somewhere to reach is it but i’m still at the top i don’t remember which one he said it was like either one or two i think we don’t uh i don’t really care about highest rated because i was like you know honestly people’s rating will be more based on themselves like it’s just like actually to use your gym example um most people aren’t like if you’re out of shape it’s not because you have the wrong workout program and trainer it’s because you know most likely you’re not even going to the gym then if you are going to the gym you’re not working going consistently if you’re not going consistently if you’re even if you are going constantly you’re not working out with intensity and then comes the program for back buys and shoulders that’s going to help you get the most gains and so similarly like i had um it’s like yeah we had a high rated course but then i looked at i was like man 15 or 20 percent of people just never showed up to singapore they paid and never showed up like damn that’s that’s on them like i don’t think you could solve that yeah well you know and i and i luckily i was wise enough to not have heartache over that because i was like that’s actually just like a completely common pattern with all online education is people don’t finish or they don’t start for something that they’ll even pay a bunch of money for which is really wild so it’s like of the people that come what kind of experience do they have and then you know six months nine months later are you still getting emails being like yo i used your thing it was you know i got this outcome out of it that’s like that’s the only real true measure of success and i don’t think if 100 people go into the course it’s not going to be 100 people who have that 20 people aren’t even going to show up you know 60 60 of them are gonna forget everything within a year or never never implement it and really it’s like the 15 to 20 out of 100 that go like use the thing and better they’re better themselves yeah it sucks um do you want to talk about this bitcoin bitcoin couple what do you want to talk about uh i have okay so i have a couple ideas and then i have a couple random topics but let’s do ideas first so i want to i want to shout out a couple ideas i saw other people saying that i thought were kind of interesting so uh here’s the first one so you invested in this thing stonks.com right i did and uh explain for people who don’t know what stonks is explain what it is because it’s actually kind of like pretty dope i had the opportunity to invest i know the guy super well who started it uh he was our biggest competitor when we were doing my startup so i was like watching them i kind of saw how they operate so i knew these these guys are really good but i didn’t get the idea fully right away and the valuation was really high because they have a good track record so i was like ah okay i’ll just pass i’ll be a user not an investor you invested so explain what it is yeah so it’s like shark tank meets angel list and so angel is a platform where you can if anyone starts a company they can go on and they can get investors and they make it easy so anyone could invest like a thousand dollars into your company and you know what shark tank is and so basically stocks you could spell the like the reason i was like is this gonna work because it’s spelled like a joke yeah yeah it looks like it’s like smells like a meme and like their logo is like a silly it’s like the wall street bets guy but it’s uh so once a how often what’s the cadence now is it every day or once a week no i don’t think it’s every day i think it’s once a week or so so once a week but then they have like big ones that are once a month and they do some pre-vetting and they find interesting startups and all types of entrepreneur investors are on the phone or on the call listening and they could ping in with a question and the whole audience can watch in real time and so i’ve been a guest i’ve been an investor or they call it investors where you’re like you’re able to ask questions and i’ve seen people write checks for fifty and a hundred thousand dollars live so the experience is like a live like a twitch channel basically like an auction so a startup goes up they pitch their thing the investor some investors can ask questions in the chat some are asking questions live and then you just see in the chat it’s like so and so is investing ten thousand dollars so and so is putting in forty thousand dollars so as i was putting two thousand dollars in have you seen one where people they’ll raise like i think somebody raised over 10 million dollars in 10 minutes is that right i think well the company raised 10 million stocks right raised money from guys like me but and then andreessen horowitz just like angel investors and then they let their users invest and they raised like 10 or 15 million dollars in a few hours and so so what is what’s cool is you’re a founder normally your fundraising is like this multi-month process that you’re almost dreading getting started with you’re like okay i gotta first get all my ducks in a row and then i gotta start reaching out and figure making a list a pipeline to reach out to then asking people to go out to coffees or asking for intros and following up and then pitching and then follow-up meetings this shrinks that three-month process into like seven minutes on stage that’s what’s dope about this for the for the founder for the investor it’s also a time saver right because and my job is to look at interesting companies so these guys if they’re doing the hard work of curating them and putting them on stage and letting me make a snap decision they’re creating a demo day basically where they they pack in a bunch of good startups and in theory right and the whole it’s either going to work because they curate great startups or it’s going to not work because the great startups don’t want to do this well how did that’s the best when i talked to him i was like oh this is a no-brainer i only invested ten thousand dollars but it was it because i would i would have done more but uh this was early on he was like you know it’s twitch for um twitch for angel investing and i’ve just seen every other live streaming pro with too much battle scars like i’ve seen so many live stream products fail and i was like bro why are you going into this you know that as well as i do you know like that’s so hard to do i didn’t really understand what he was saying as the idea and then he i was like so i asked him a couple questions he sent me the memo and i saw the evaluation i was like uh so i think it’s a dope idea okay so now here’s the the riff on it right so that’s cool in and of itself so uh elaine zelby who’s been on the pod a couple times before and she has she’s uh she’s an idea person just like us so she had this idea that i thought was pretty cool she goes stonks.com for other things it’s i agree can i tell you what one of our friends uh moyes ali tweeted something and it needs to be for homes stocks for homes like it’s because what the the cool thing about stonks is you could see what other what questions other smart people are asking and with cars so bring a bring a bring a trailer my favorite car website it has a comment section and i could see what smart people are asking like is this a 67 or a a 1967 or a 1968 because the 1967’s offered this thing and the real collector’s items at 68. you know what i’m just picking that up but with and with houses it’s the same thing like i i remember our home like our realtor was saying like is this made out of stucco or this other thing and i’m like i don’t know what any of that is and then they’re like did you guys like spray the installation or is it like i’m like i i don’t know what that means i i i wish i could see like what questions i knew smart people were asking and i wish you could do that live okay i wish i could i wish and then you could have an up vote and up vote and i think i would like it to be for houses so i think uh okay that’s interesting the one that she had said that i thought was pretty cool was hiring so stonks.com for people okay so how does that work so okay there’s general hiring which is like you know our hiring is like this like large spectrum from like temp staffing where i just need like a hourly employee to show up today and then like tomorrow they may not come back to like craigslist to uh then you get to like linkedin and indeed which is kind of like mass market if i’m a if i’m a you know junior you know or i’m a mid-level marketing manager i might get job opportunities on linkedin or indeed that might be where i go look then you have like angel list like vertical places where it’s like if i want a job in startups i won’t go to indeed i’ll go to angel list because that’s where the startups hire or the that’s a job board for startups and so then you have this one like really interesting thing and then you have like headhunters which do executive placements and kind of like uh you know how do you find a cmo you hire a head hunter you pay a ton of money and then they get like a huge cut so somewhere in there i think there’s an opportunity to let people hire like top talent live like this so if you were able to essentially it’s like a reverse job interview so instead of me going and interviewing you know what this kind of reminds me of it’s kind of i’ll say it though this kind of sounds like a like a like a slave yeah i think you’re gonna say you’re gonna go there and actually it makes me it makes me a little this makes me very uncomfortable actually like that i mean like a talent auction is that what we’re going to call it now dude it’s yes at will bro it’s like you get paid or not like that’s like saying employment to slavery right it’s not um so so but there was a website i don’t know if you saw it coming out that co it was called developer auction it was controversial for this exact reason so this came out maybe six years ago or so it ended up um it got really hot so what they were doing was they’re saying look how developers are talking it was like part of yc or they were they piggybacked on yc in some way i don’t remember if they were a yc company or what they did was they were like we’re only going to take developers or we’re only going to let yc companies hire from this place so it’s like if you’re a dev who wants to work for a yc company come on to developer auction you get the highest dollar bid because these guys have money and they want great devs which which was just a little bit of icing on the douche cake like you’re you’re doing it yeah you’re doing an auction now you’re doing it only for yc yeah that’s the late that’s the cherry on top of the douchebag cake the douche de leche cake yeah so so basically they they kind of did that and so what was happening was developers were getting way more money on this and they also didn’t have to do like a multi-week job interviewing process it was like they say hey yeah i was at reddit earlyish first 40 employees i worked on the fraud fraud system and this and this i’m interested in you know companies doing machine learning and then boom job offer and job offer at a 20 premium and developer auction all they had to do was just say they just had to be like harvard they just had to be selective it’s like no not any company can just apply here we’re gonna pick and then no not any developer can apply here we’re going to pick now ultimately i don’t think the model worked because they’re not like the biggest thing ever now i think they ended up like kind of pivoting or softening it well all talent marketplaces are really hard businesses i think to scale yeah yeah to scale i think that you could have a lot of you can have like you can be a just a recruiter and make millions of dollars a year you could be just a job board to make millions of dollars a year but if you want to be hired.com then it i don’t know if it can it’s really hard to work so i think the trick here is to do it with something that’s visual so okay stonks is cool because it’s a live video stream so one question is what in what what category does having a visual screen that’s showing you something work way better than a resume that was attached to an email or a job board and so i think like potentially designers or even something like more niche than that like 3d designers video editors graphics something like that like this could be maybe how like the video game industry hires or something like that i don’t know there’s there’s something there to doing this oh that’s what she said elaine she said i don’t know i didn’t i didn’t see which exact example she had the example of hiring and i didn’t even read on i was like yeah great idea let me just like riff off that that’s pretty interesting so i thought that was cool and then i think there’s probably some other areas where you could do that and i think the trick normally the reason live streaming products fail is because the viewers your computer like you don’t want to compete for viewers with people who are just doing this for leisure um because they have a ton of options they can just open tick tock they can you know go for a walk they can do anything you need people you need the viewers of the buy side for this to be their job so that’s why actually real estate or real estate investors instead of maybe even maybe it’s not just for buying my home that i’m going to live in but maybe it’s like multi-family properties get auctioned off in this way and it’s multi-family investors that are showing up to to buy pieces of that action or something like that i think i think that would be cool i i think i told you this a hypothesis i had in 2012 or i remember when i was in the apartment business we had like a an apartment finder thing and uh i was like i’m pretty sure that people it’s not that far away that people are gonna start renting homes and buying homes without ever seeing them in person like like like uh this was before matterport was around and i think we’re there like i i would buy a house would you buy a house without seeing it no i would maybe not mind rent i for sure would rent a place without seeing it yeah uh i maybe would buy but i think i i there’s a world i think where we’re gonna buy them soon without ever seeing a house right the other one that’s kind of all out of left field here is did you ever watch the zoom bachelor that some of our friends did sheila was the zoom bachelor did you ever watch it uh no i don’t watch that [ ] though was it awesome in real sports well i just don’t watch reality tv you know i watch good stuff it was like it was like just people it wasn’t real tv even but it was basically like an object you’re shield he’s a he’s an investor he’s single he’s a good guy we think he’s great and so as a as a joke as a kind of a lark they created a a live stream and they curated a bunch of single women and they were like all right uh and they basically in the course of an hour it was like here’s six women they introduce themselves he cuts two it’s like all right of the four women now he’s gonna ask you a question like all right what’s your ideal friday night date what would we do and then one girl’s like oh i think we would whatever like just how many times movie whatever there was like i don’t know like 500 people live watching it which is a pretty big like live stream channel pretty good um and this was like again it was all kind of done as a joke it was just friends i don’t think that any of them really wanted to date each other but it was just like to do the show but maybe there’s something like that right the bachelor is one of the highest rated shows ever and then you see stuff there’s like a matchmaker show on netflix that’s like indian matchmaker or something like that as people pay thousands of dollars to like uh to matchmakers to find like kind of like eligible candidates like that’s a that’s a that is a niche thing that exists in every city you and i have a friend you have and i you and i have a single friend and i for a gift i nearly bought him a four thousand dollar matchmaker and i didn’t end up going through with it because like i don’t know if they’re gonna like follow through with this and that’s too much money to spend if they don’t do it and i don’t know if they’re gonna find it insulting but i was like i interviewed this lady three different times i’m like trying to figure out this would be the right fit for our friend um i think that i think they’re interesting i think more people should use that so i think that if there was a private version of this that was you know it was more expensive well so now we’re talking about auctioning off sex yes we’re talking about auction off the things people want right so yeah it just happens to be talent sex things like williams has said this quote ev williams started uh twitter and blogger before that and medium now he uh he goes here’s the recipe for a billion dollar internet company have you heard this quote before he goes here’s here’s the recipe for a billion dollar internet company take a human desire preferably one that’s been around for hundreds of years use technology to remove steps that was his whole thing he’s like you know and so he’s like that’s how i built blogger twitter everything else like twitter took out a bunch of steps for a human desire that people had and um and i think that’s just like you know sounds stupidly simple but is actually true let me tell you about something that i saw i did not research this at all for this talk but i wanted to just bring it up because we were talking something about something similar um i’m trying to find i’m trying to figure out how i’m going to manage so i bought this farm i need to like get a manager to help run it and there’s these property management companies but they don’t really have like the touch it’s a little sterile and like to make this work the way i want it to work i want someone that’s a little bit more close to it um so in your brain in your head when i think of an outsourced person like what’s like the image that you’re that i that you get can you just trying to give you can’t explain that to me no no just just tell me like outsource vr uh a virtual assistant yeah like i don’t know somebody in the philippines or india who’s you know sitting at a desk uh you know stepping away for for like in a call center or style style exactly okay now when i’d say um military spouse military spouse what comes to your mind patriot a woman in america uh white blonde hair uh speaks great english sitting you know in the comfort of her you know her home office uh talking to you know customers what attributes are there uh any loyal organized um trustworthy things like that exactly so there’s this company called squared away so google squared away we’ve talked about the one here before by the way yes we have uh but i didn’t get it we talked about one episode we did one we did one episode where we talked about um a cool way to come up with a type of company that you want is uh who would you want to hire like what demographic you want to hire so who do you want to show right that’s another one right yeah you’re ultimately gonna be serving a customer and so it helps a lot if you care about them and and understand them and want want more of them to be around you every day go uh what’s it called go squared away i don’t know why it’s called go squared away or maybe it’s just called the business squared away the domain they just couldn’t get squared.com probably and it’s the most expensive the cheapest tier is two hundred dollars for five hours great copy on this website look at this so what okay great it’s great so what’s another what’s another outsourcing company can we just find like up work like uh go to um let me just google like outsourcing or let’s say virtual assistant for uh virtual assistant if they show up on the top of google they might have good copywriting but while you’re looking for that so the copywriting on this page so you go to uh squared away it says the best company perk is personal assistance for your entire team our our team of military spouses gives you your time back and it’s a picture of a lady holding up her sign waiting for her husband to get off the plane from like coming home this screen so ben open up flexjobs.com this is this is just a perfect example flex job is not terrible right like it’s it showed up at the top of google it’s not i don’t never use the service i’m not saying that i’m saying just the website it’s not horrible but it’s not special and it doesn’t make you feel anything right so i can’t so just compare the feelings okay so and if you’re on you should be watching on youtube to be able to see this so if i go to flex jobs i see this kind of like blue and orange tacky site with stock photos of literally men and women in corporate running away running away like we’re doing a ballet leap away from you and then it says the number one job site to find vetted remote work from home and flexible job opportunities since 2007. that’s that okay great and then it and then it’s like good morning america cnn wall street journal whatever okay so this is it’s okay and the headline is find a better way to work generic vague doesn’t make me feel anything and you know just the this is this doesn’t do it now go back to go straight away go squared away what do they say the best company perk personal assistance for your entire team so already they’re selling the benefit right you who’s coming here is probably looking to hire a personal assistant um and they um and they focus on they frame it as this is the best perk you can offer your employees instead of just find a personal assistant which assumes you already know you want a personal assistant they sell you the benefit of having a personal assistant that you’re providing the best perk for your team then they have this like black and white photo of like a military mom holding a child’s hand with a sign you know uh you know like i’m thinking of thinking of you daddy as you know the as he leaves for the plane she’s like at an airport hangar right like an emotional scene and she seems like somebody who you would want to support you would love to like help this woman out and that she seems like somebody who you would want not like you know this stock photo of a corporate person running away from you how crazy is that this is beautiful branding because i don’t know how many people are in the military but like a military spouse is not like i mean uh that’s a it’s not that ex uh uh it’s not that rare so like i may hire these people for doing all types of jobs and they are a military spouse but as soon as they brand it as i i’m like oh well you definitely are a good person exactly like even though i’ve i they it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a great person but for some reason i think that even though you’re a good person you’re bringing this company up yeah right bonus points yeah you’re you’re uh you know you get free free virtue for for having brought this company up as something cool is this beautiful branding or what like why did we even why did we talk about this before we talked about before same thing we were talking about the stay-at-home mom workforce and like how do you tap into that like labor markets that are under underutilized so excess talent that doesn’t that’s that’s looking for a job and we talked about you know what could you do with stay-at-home moms and then we brought this up and they actually shared the clip because they were like hey this was cool we got like featured on this thing and so that’s how i remember that we’ve talked about it before but uh how did we get here what were you talking about so you were talking about that oh well i don’t i don’t remember we were i think you’re talking about like talent right like talent marketplaces and i was and i just i i didn’t even research i’m i signed up for uh what’s it called get square squared away i entered i’m waiting for them to call me back but i signed up because i but when i went to it i was oh my god i’m in love i want i want to hire this woman in the picture i need her i hire if i use the service it like washes away the fact that i like don’t do compost that i forgot to recycle that bottle and i feel like the woman’s just gonna have my back so hard like she’s just gonna like just so much loyalty she’s not your spouse dude [Laughter] no but she’s my partner that’s like how i feel and i just thought they don’t they this website i’ve never seen i’ve never felt this way about a woman oh jonathan brought my wife you were talking about managing your ranch so you were saying you might use this instead or just kind of it reminded you that nobody’s doing that in the past space of making you feel the way that this makes you feel about assistance is that right i don’t even remember the angle that i had but yes i think i’m going to use this to manage my ranch but i thought i thought that and good example of a landing page so uh all right so let’s let’s go to another one so can i tell you uh all right i’ll do a quick one i just want to get your take on this so i followed this guy uh and i don’t know if this is his name because it sounds like a fake name i’ve been talking to him i just sort of realized i don’t know if this is his real name uh but his his twitter handle is pure rich and i don’t know if he’s if his name is pure rich his name is al okay his name is his name is peter richardson peter richardson so that’s his name uh so anyways he he’s uh he’s another guy who tried to talent marketplace and now he’s pivoted to something sweet uh he had initially he had a yc company and it like didn’t work out and then he like as a like they just needed money and they were like yo we just shut down our company um you can you can hire us we’re a yc duo you can just hire us we’ll do a project for you for like as a contractor for like two weeks cost money but like you’re getting a yc founder duo where can you hire that oh my god and i was like dude this is [ ] amazing i was like i would love to hire yc founder duos and i was like if you think about it like some number maybe 20 30 40 of yc companies are gonna shut down and like you know those people might just go get jobs but actually it might be cool for them to like continue to brand themselves as a yc company as a yc founders and be able to be higher be able for hire so they did that for a little bit and i thought that was cool that’s how i got in touch with him now he’s doing something called cal.com have you seen this it’s a competitor to calendly cal dot com great number domain just email all right all right so scheduling infrastructure for absolutely everyone so basically what they are is we’ve talked about calendly calendly before calendly basically gives you a little a link that’s a calendar where somebody can book you and so that’s great for like a salesperson who’s like uh hey i would love to chat about you know how we might be able to help you out here’s a link to my calendar grab a time that works for you and it like lets you go pick a time it emails both of you a calendar invited like takes care of the whole like booking process so calendly had become like a i think a billion dollar plus company uh recently two billion dollar company and they’re aren’t they like weren’t they bootstrapped for like a really long time or something crazy they had like yeah the guy was an african immigrant who uh bootstrapped it for like 20 million in revenue raised around at like a billion and then recently raised another round at like two or three or four so that business is working so cal.com i think is a great competitor so i’m gonna invest in this because i believe in this model that they’re doing which is commercial open source software so cal calendly is not open source cal.com is is open source what does that mean that means you can hey you can read the source code b you can basically like self-host it so a lot of companies don’t want their kind of like data and for information in the hands of another company they like to be able to self-host the software that they’re using and also be able to fork it or remix it in some way that like is customizable to them these guys are growing fast i switched over from calmly now i use cal is it awesome yeah it’s a sick product and you could you embed these on your website so it’s like if you have a website you’re like i don’t know uh you give people you’re you’re a lawyer you need people like instead of saying here’s a contact us form and then one of our humans will reach out to you and then we’ll try to schedule a time and by that time you already forgot how interested you were so what this does is do just embed your your booking calendar right here and it reads your existing calendar so it won’t let anybody book a time that’s already taken and you can set up rules like don’t do meeting like i need a minimum 10 minute gap in between meetings or whatever right you set some rules you just embed that right here so in the heat of the moment when somebody’s interested you can grab that lead right away to get them booked for a meeting do but how do you use it because you’re not a company you’re so i’ll use it either for if i’m going to invest in if i’m if i’m doing talking to founder and it’s like hey yeah i would love to chat sometime next week all right you know here’s my calendar feel free to grab any time that works for you um and some people find that like offensive whatever i don’t know people are too sensitive about [ ] like you know just trying to be it’s we’re trying to try to make it flexible for the other person to pick whatever time works for them without requiring for email back and forth or pawning you off to my assistant who’s gonna like take it from here um and you’ll have to email them four times to find a time that works and so uh so i use it for that i’ll also use it for like random meetings so i’ll have a calendly that’s just you know like i’ll have like you know just backslash sean and i’ll put like a one hour of random meetings once per month that anybody on the internet can go book and so those are ways that that i just add a little like randomness and serendipity into my life that’s like in a controlled fashion of when when it can happen dude this is cool you they did a really funny flex so if you go to the website you see a thing that says claim your username when you refresh consistently you see different names in the autofilled example and it’s all people who are well known and i bet are investors of the company and you see that and you’re like oh well james beshear said neval this person yeah those guys are they are investors yeah isn’t that funny how they did that yeah that’s cool and i think if you look by the way this is a common model there’s a closed source winner and there’s an open source winner for a bunch of different categories and software so this is just like a very simple way to find good deals is if you if you missed out or you see a great company that’s like completely closed source just google for the commercial open source company and then if they have a great team behind them there’s usually like a separate segment of the market that’s quite large that they can attack just by going from this like open source self-hosted model these guys have exploded they went from like nothing to a lot of traffic they’re growing fast yeah you should invest too i can introduce you yeah do it i would love i love this stuff can we talk about the bitcoin thing please yeah let’s do it by the way i didn’t even say his idea all right that whole thing wasn’t even the thing oh what’s the idea what he tweeted out he goes um i wish somebody built this called the anywhere school i think this is just kind of interesting so he goes the anywhere school is for people who want to travel the world but they don’t want their kids to education to suffer so here’s how it goes and he put out just like a one-page pdf memo of just like here’s what it would be if anyone’s building this like you know take this and run with it and let me know and so what it was is like you join a classroom but it’s a traveling classroom around the world so the classroom’s gonna be like we’re gonna spend three months this year in paris you know three months in bali and three months in wherever you know like thailand and three months in in south africa and the family and the kids go with it so the kids get a consistent structure the teacher stays the same their friends stay the same but they get to experience a year of world travel and um and so it’s like for prep for people who want to have travel but don’t want to wait or don’t want to trade off their kids stability and education i actually think that’s a kind of a cool idea i don’t think this is like a huge huge business maybe it’s bigger than i think but i just think that’s awesome and that should be pretty neat so the anywhere i’m on board and that and and i also think that’s a while i was googling anywhere school and uh there’s nothing interesting it’s a great great name right i think it’s a great name it’s great okay let’s let’s do the bitcoin wait really quick before we get to that what were you gonna say about strauss zelnick dude you’re gonna love this so you know i i i know so explain who he is yeah so there’s this guy named so there’s this guy named strauss how do you pronounce this i think it’s right zelnick uh i’m i’m just doing this off memory so correct me i think he’s the ceo of uh uh take two interactive which is basically the owner or creator of grand theft auto and like in like eight other games that are of that caliber so like uh maybe like a five or ten billion dollar a year company that owns like the biggest video games in the world and he’s probably in his mid to late 50s and he looks like a gi joe so he’s this like jacked dude who gets up at like 5 a.m in new york and works out really hard and a lot of people are invited to go work out with them um but it’s all like high caliber get average that’s exactly right so he created a kind of like i call it the breakfast club but it’s basically like a morning a morning workout club and ben you can google this so there’s a a youtube video that’s called strauss zellnex invitation only fitness club it’s a two minute video so it’s just like really easy to watch and you can see basically um when you go to it it’s he goes he goes i made a decision that i was going to treat fitness as a like important part of my schedule so like okay i’m a ceo if i had a board meeting i’m not going to skip it or move it because i’m feeling tired right so he’s like i’m gonna treat fitness the same way that i would treat uh like like a like a meeting or family time or whatever like i’m gonna put it like first order importance and then he’s like but you know how do i like juice this up and i’m a big fan of this this is a big life hack which is multiply activities so you know like i’ve done this before too which is you want to hang out with cool people or have friends but you you don’t you know you only have maybe like one hour of recreation a day so are you gonna choose fitness or friends well even better let me just find friends who like fitness and let’s work out together right you do this all the time i do this too and so what he did was he was like all right we’re gonna wake up at five or six in the morning um in new york and they go somewhere and do a different fitness related activity it doesn’t matter how fit you are although the pictures that they share like everybody’s got like a six-pack everyone’s jacked and then it’s called like the program and it’s basically like kind of networking kind of friends hanging out and kind of fitness all at once uh but instead of being kind of each of them actually that’s the wrong way to say it it’s it’s like the 100 of each of those because when you work out with somebody it’s like the new york banker exactly and so they get up they do something different every day and um and he like would pay for it so he’s like all right if we’re doing this activity like money is not going to be the object that stops somebody from doing this so i’ll just cover it for our whole group and we’ll just go do whatever the heck activity we want to do and so the guy’s in great shape he’s like oh i love it because i get to hang out with like a bunch of like really interesting motivated like kind of 20 or 30 year olds that are like pushing me to a be more fit and like don’t be the old man but also like these are really talented ambitious people who are who see the world differently than me right and so i thought this is just a fantastic idea and um bev tell me a friend of a friend of a friend of his was was doing it and uh i was invited when i was in new york but for some reason the scheduling didn’t work out i couldn’t go yeah they get up early that’s the beauty of everything right so how do you prevent this from being just the moochers show up who just want you know just the networking and all that you make it at 6am uh and you make the fitness thing kind of hard that’s the filter that will self-select for the type of person you want to be around for this kind of thing i just hate working out at 6 00 a.m i hate working out i thought you’d be all about it because you know the harder the better for you i yeah like i would go but like the problem with my my issue with working out at 6 a.m means i’ve got to wake up at like 5 20 which means i’ve gotta go go to bed at like nine and if i have to go to bed at nine i’m in bed at nine and i’m so anxious saying to myself if i don’t go to sleep now like i’m not gonna be able to wake up and i get so anxious about waking up early that it makes it not funny totally tell you you know what i mean i i i don’t work out early i work out as a midday break every day so i i work out like that two p.m every day and uh and actually i pretty much stop working at that point then i come back and i start working again at like 11 p.m or midnight and so i don’t have to wake up early and i have a bunch of energy when i do that but the the the takeaway for this for me um the voice in my head when i heard this i go oh yeah i forgot sean build your cult and um i think that’s just like the take away i think you gotta build your cult it’s like do the things you want to do uh open them up so that others can do them with you do them in a way that’s like slightly hard and everybody’s making a bit of a everyone’s stretching themselves in some way because that’s the sacrifice and the buy-in the blood oath that you want in your cult and like just [ ] build your cult be around the type person you want to be around dude this is this is why you’re building your cult that’s a great example i was doing it like general assembly guy what did he do uh daybreaker yeah daybreaker it was like a 5 a.m party with no alcohol you’re cold right like what do i want i want to start my day yeah a bunch of energy dance blah blah blah but i don’t want alcohol and music i don’t like nightclubs so i’m gonna bring i’m gonna build my own cult that’s awesome uh all right did you have anything else you wanted to do or should we wrap it sounds good