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Kind: captions Language: en let’s go outside of the tech world so uh two brands that that I uh I’m looking at that have lasted a long time Louis Vuitton Louis Vuitton has lasted maybe 250 years now and when you think of Louis Vuitton you know what you’re getting same at New York Times New York Times has been around for 250 years not Everyone likes them but you know what they’re pursuing which is their version of the truth but then let’s go to Raising Cane’s you ever been to Raising Canes Dude Love raising case I met the founder of Raising Canes once he is awesome [Music] we’re live what’s going on what up how are you uh I’m thriving all right good so I’ve been thinking about this conversation you and I had we talked about Outsourcing and I’m actually going to put a lot of words in your mouth you didn’t actually say everything I I’m implying that you said a lot of stuff which you didn’t exactly say so so you’re kind of more of a representation but Rob Dyrdek said something amazing on this pot uh a few pods ago he said two amazing things one he goes if I just do these he goes I was what did he say he goes I was making I was looking for these 20 30 million dollar wins instead I’m gonna look at and I would do like 12 of them he said he goes instead I’m actually only gonna do one or two things and I’m and I’m gonna hope that they’re gonna be big and then he also said he has this thing called Forever Estates do you remember what he talked about forever Estates so afterwards he sent me mock-ups of this and I like Google the architect and everything and there was this really cool article that they rob and the architect wrote together so forever Estates Rob said I want to build this home so basically he said he had 12 million dollars liquid at the time 10 million dollars he went and bought this plot of land and then he goes to build the home I want it’s going to cost 30 million dollars at the time I didn’t have that and I it sounds like he maybe he has it now but he was like basically I want to build this home where the deer dick family for many generations can meet at this home to discuss Family Planning and family issues and things like that and so I’m going to build this home exactly how I want it and we’re going to call it forever Estates because hopefully it lives forever I found that very inspiring did you find that inspiring loved it loved it I love when people take an absurdly Long View and more than anything I love when people have a vision for their life and what they’re doing when somebody’s got it it was awesome and compelling vision for their life that is like one of the most attractive traits to me it doesn’t even matter if I agree with that Vision it’s that they have that vision and that they agree with that vision is what matters I thought it was awesome and he sent me mock-ups of the home and I was like dude this is so inspiring and so I got I got all up hot and bothered about this it was awesome to me and so I started thinking about companies that can last a long time uh I’ve been a little bit obsessed with this because with Hampton things are going well we’re not a success yet but it’s very clear that like I always tell our team physics will allow this to work there’s demand I’ve got a good audience for this we’ve got a good team physics allows us to exist there’s nothing that gets in the way of this we’re already somewhat successful the only question is how great will it become and I’m starting to think how do you create something that lasts 50 in a or 100 years whatever it is and the word brand is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot and I think you and I as well as our audience we get in these like short-term thinking and we use like the a word the Arbitrage word or we use like we use these certain words that people actually don’t think about branding they don’t think about soul and I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately and there’s this book that I’m uh reading where it’s called lessons from the century or lessons from the century companies Club so it’s like this one woman studied like companies that have lasted 100 years and she’s like what do they all have in common and I’ve been thinking a lot about that and you brought up something you said you invested in this company Shepherd which I think is awesome I actually am starting to use them um I’ll give you a plug is it grow Shepherd or support shepherdsheper.com yeah support shepherd.com you talked about that investment uh in the company and it’s and you’re talking about Outsourcing it’s basically you hire people in the Philippines I think also Latin America and they do a bunch of odd jobs but you said something like I want to hire tons of these people and I started thinking about that I started thinking should I do that and then I realized I shouldn’t do that because I actually should do that for some roles but the thing that like you should do it for some rules but I had this like off-site this like uh Hampton retreat with like a bunch of our employees and I realized you have to build a real strong company culture and you have to figure out how do you keep employees for a long time and that’s one of the key keys to building a brand that can last a long time and I wanted to hear how are you and this by the way this topic is not that exciting for anyone who’s in survival mode this topic is more exciting for people who are in like Thrive mode where it’s like I got this thing working to be clear the first phase of the company is just build something that people want and figure out if you can get it to them um right don’t worry about culture don’t worry about brand don’t worry about the forever plan don’t worry about the 25-year Vision um none of it’s gonna matter if you can’t do the first thing Sam has done the first thing with Hampton he has proven that he can create something that people actually want and he could sell it to them so now he’s thinking you know and now you get what I call Progressive ambition I want to do a whole video on Progressive ambition I’m going to show people if you go back and you watch Mark Zuckerberg’s early interviews and people are like where does this go from here you’re on eight campuses now you’re where are you gonna we’re gonna open this up to everybody high schoolers everything he goes he’s like 50 schools he’s like well you know our goal is to get to you know all the major colleges um I’m not sure everyone keeps saying why you know expand expand expand some things are cooler when you don’t expand and I don’t think why do we have to open up to everybody I’m not sure I mean some some things are really we can build something really really useful for college students so maybe we should just do that and then now the guy’s like created like hot air balloons that give internet to Farmers in India so that they can use Facebook right it’s like he got progressively more ambitious as he went along and that’s which is a crazy story in itself by the way Facebook uh I think Sarah helped to work on this or something at Facebook Facebook basically puts these planes over India so any Indian can access Internet because the issue with growth of Facebook is they literally have everyone on the internet they have to create more internet for people they got to create a bit more Tam I’m like we’re tamping it up right now hold on we gotta give more people the internet so they could use our app but that’s cool that it started where that’s a great phrase Progressive ambition very common for different companies you can go back I’m a forensic I’m an archaeologist I go back into the to go study the early origins of these companies and you find this very very commonly that they start with a sort of humble ambition then as things start to work they snowball their ambition they become more and more ambitious as they go realizing the opportunity is wider and bigger than they had initially uh you know planned for and that one step of success earns the right to go for the next step of success and that it is okay to ladder up because what most people do is they look at them today they say well now they’re trying to do a b c and d so I when I start need to also plan for a b c and d and it’s actually like no you actually just start with a you don’t actually have to do anything else of course there are exceptions there’s Elon Musk saying we’re gonna you know but you know even Elon for example let’s take one of the most ambitious companies in the world SpaceX right what’s the goal what’s the mission statement it’s like make the human species multi-planetary so we can survive when we ruin Earth uh or Earth gets you know hit by an asteroid or whatever and so it’s like wow what’s more ambitious than creating a rock literally rocket science to create rockets that will eventually take us to live on Mars wow that’s like the biggest Vision ever when SpaceX started his initial vision was to do a test demonstration sending a plant in a rocket into a certain like a certain height I don’t remember exactly where it was to you know have the first living thing you know go out of uh you know past the moon or whatever wherever you’re trying to take it and that’s all we want to do is just take a plant out there and he’s like oh I’ll just fund this you know take me 20 million dollars but it’ll inspire people towards science and you know hopefully NASA will then fund real Mars missions after that and then only you know along the way he’s like you know what screw this plant thing I’m gonna let’s actually do it ourselves we don’t need to inspire an asset let’s just do the whole thing ourselves he also got progressively more ambitious and also when he first started he started a thing called zip2 which I’m almost certain it’s basically like putting the yellow pages on the internet which I’m sure he had some cute way of spinning it where it was a grand plan but it it he made 20 million dollars off of it which is a lot of money but he was like in his head he’s like I gotta get my nut you know what I’m saying he’s like you see every every human has a number a phone number and you can reach them this is one of the most marvelous things in the world and you need a way to reach them it’s information you know he’ll make anything sound fancy but actually one of the interesting things is Elon is also credited as like you know the you know he found he created PayPal he didn’t actually create PayPal uh you know PayPal the product was created by you know first Max leban and Peter Thiel but even then when they merged with elon’s company he had this big vision for x.com he’s like x.com is going to be everybody’s full Financial life it’s going to be banking it’s going to be mortgages it’s going to be loans it’s going to be sending money it’s going to be savings accounts it’s going to be all things to all people and that was the vision for x.com when they merged Elon was the CEO of the merged company and the plan was to createx.com and so he had this big audacious crazy vision his forever plan about how he’s just going to change the whole financial system and actually the only thing that worked was going back to the basics let’s make something that people actually want see if we can get it to them and it was like oh yeah eBay sellers would love a way for people to to pay the money when they send them the like beanie babies and so literally it was send money via send money via email small amounts hang a pal was the was the actual use case that people wanted and needed and it was only when they essentially booted him out and focused on that small use case the smaller Vision did PayPal actually take off and so you know sometimes you almost have the reverse or you start to audacious and actually you needed you you skipped the step of finding that initial foothold and that’s what PayPal actually did and here’s the rub which is which is very similar to that that I’m experiencing that I’m trying to think about which is how do you balance take so so in order to build a company that lasts a long time you need to you need a few things which I can talk about but you it starts with having a brand it starts with having a very clear defined purpose it starts with having you have to have employees who you want to work with for a long time and there’s a bunch of things but how do you balance paying the bills and taking customers and also like having this mission that might be polarizing to people and I’m trying to figure out when is that transition do you always have it and that’s something that I’m that I’m constantly thinking about now which is like where I don’t think it’s a switch I think you have to have it embedded in your culture early on but where do you make sacrifices where do you make sacrifices I’m not sure I’m not sure on on going from short term to long term thinking how that happens and that’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately so it’s hard to kind of give advice without any specifics but I’ll do it anyways I’ll be the advice guy for a second so when I was doing my very first company it was a stupid company we’re trying to do the I’m trying to make a restaurant chain the Chipotle of sushi and we had all these micro decisions to make like any business does on a day-to-day basis should we use this packaging or this packaging for our thing well this one costs costs more and looks better but this other one you know we would have better margins because it costs less and then there’s this other one that’s eco-friendly and blah blah and so one of our mentors at Duke she um sat us down and she’s like guys you’re having The Wrong conversation and we’re like what do you mean and she’s like it’s not about packaging what do you mean she’s like well let me ask you this what decision would what decision can you make Upstream of this that would make your packaging decision obvious I was like well we don’t really get it she’s like you got to know what do you value right are you about ruthless efficiency and margins because if so then the choice is obvious there’s no choice right you just choose the one with the cheap packaging with the best margins are you about are you is your number one value the quality of the customer experience uh because if it’s the quality of the customer experience you’re definitely not going to choose a cheap one but you also won’t choose the Eco one that’s going to kind of melt you know the old paper straws problem it’s not actually the best product but it is eco-friendly it’s like so if you’re all about product quality that’s what you’re gonna gonna go all in on that’s your number one value then the packaging decision is obvious same thing with the other side if you’re all about sustainability if that’s your number one value then the decision is obvious she’s like you don’t know which packaging to pick because you don’t know what you stand for you don’t know your values and she’s like what you want to do is figure out your values number one so what are the things you value more than more than other things because they’re and you only know what you value when you’re choosing amongst good options it’s obvious to Value something when you have a good option and a bad option there’s no you didn’t test your values there your values only get tested when you have multiple good options but they’re good in different ways and that’s when you need to know which one do we value um the second thing that she said was uh Jeff Bezos has this great quote where he goes they’re like oh you know Amazon has been around forever and uh you guys have just kept growing and growing and growing and you know through every Innovation cycle you know the internet mobile phones whatever Amazon has been Cloud you know Amazon’s done great how do you stay on top of the curve and he goes because we don’t look for Trends he goes we ask ourselves the opposite question instead of saying what’s going to change we say what’s not going to change so basically he’s like good we’re customer obsessed that’s the number one value for them and he’s like number two we ask what’s not going to change oh P are people ever going to want less selection no are they ever going to want higher prices no are they ever going to want slower delivery no Okay cool so now we know that those are never the never changing things so all we got to do is how to figure out how to give them more selection lower prices and faster delivery that’s what they care about they’re never going to not care about those things they’re always going to care and all we got to do is just continually find a way to do that so I think that gives you a sort of long-term orientation like for Hampton what would you say say are the never going to change things I’ve got to figure that out frankly when I started it was the same thing as Zuckerberg which was I just want to like be around smart people you know what I mean are people ever going to want to be around lower quality Founders no they’re always going to want that bar going up that they would look in their peer group and they’re in awe how did I get in this room right I think that’s going to be the first feeling you want to create is holy [ ] all the other people in my group are awesome I can’t wait to talk to these people right that’s going to be I think always the number one the quality of the other members in their group to them and then I I think the the thing I’ve been thinking about is they’re always going to want their peers to be committed so you have if so we’ve been thinking about what happens if you don’t show up to a meeting it’s like well we should just ban them let’s ban them you miss them both of those things we mentioned hurts Revenue because if you make the exactly you want to increase Revenue widen the door baby let them all in they’ll let everybody who wants to pay the bill come in okay but now you’ve ruined the quality of member problem you know the long-term people will never want this to go in that direction you’re screwing that up for short-term profit same same thing on the people don’t show up you ban them or you also you know have to go ahead and remove that subscription revenue from from the from from the old stripe account and so you’re not going to want to do that either but it will only happen if you take this long-term orientation and say no no the thing we value the most is people want a product it’s high quality people that show up and care about this community about this group and if either of those two every decision has to be first and foremost from that point of view does this increase the quality of our members or decrease it does this increase the commitment levels or decrease it and I also think that so you you were given the example of Facebook and Amazon and I looked at those as examples as well but Raising Cane’s ever been to Raising Canes love raising case I met the awesome you guys gotta I don’t know his name but Google Raising Cane’s sound founder and like watch talks with this guy he’s like a southern boy I think from Louisiana he started a chicken finger place I think at LSU and if you go to Raising Kings now here’s what you’re gonna get they all they sell is chicken fingers you can basically get them deep uh breaded and deep fried or not breaded and deep fried and then I think they only sell fried or fried or obesity fried which one do you want yeah like there’s like there’s only there’s no options and you get it on a styrofoam like a styrofoam uh like uh school lunch box like type of thing and they’re not fancy but you know what you’re gonna get every time and he’s like adamant he’s like We Are Gonna perfect this we’re gonna get this it’s gonna be fried the exact same time every single time and it’s not sophisticated but you know what you’re gonna get another brand that I like [ ] Dollar General you ever go to a Dollar General yeah of course dude it’s it’s not sophisticated it’s not high-end but you know they’re just gonna have a ton of stuff and it’s going to be low quality and it’s going to be affordable you know what you’re gonna get every time so I don’t think you need this sophisticated like it’s day one here at Amazon and we’re like no you don’t need that you could have like no like we’re fashion Nova like it’s cheap apparel that you know you don’t have to make a lot of money and you could buy it and we’re always going to be on top of [ ] you don’t need a lot of that stuff uh that high-end like sophisticated stuff you can be anything but it’s just cool that like to see people who are adamant about what they are and they just deliver value every time or at least they’re focus on the brand so anyway that’s my spiel about that and the reason I was thinking about it was because you were talking about Outsourcing stuff and I’m like oh that definitely seems cheaper but is it cheaper for every role in the long term because you have to build in order to build a brand that lasts a long time and let’s let’s let’s be straight here this is all about like doing dope [ ] it’s also about making more money I think you can make more money if you drag out your Excel sheet you’re like oh this grows 30 20 every year yeah drag that [ ] out for 50 years AC let’s see what’s going on over there right this is it’s this is also rooted in like Adventure and fun exciting and in greed so I don’t want to get that twisted uh but anyway you have people who want to work for you for 10 20 years uh it gets really interesting and I think you can actually like embed different things in culture do you know White Castle you ever heard of White Castle you know what that is right dude White Castle I [ ] love White Castle I went and looked at their like LinkedIn I was trying to figure out their executive team like all of them have worked there for like 30 years and they used to make fun of them like oh man these [ ] suits I’m like no no no no they know who their customers they know what they’re doing and you get the same [ ] every time and it works because there are people have worked there for [ ] 30 years and they like know what the company’s about so anyway that’s my rant rant over but it’s something I’m thinking about it it’s something I’m thinking about I’m glad we just discussed says publicly I’m actually gonna I was taking notes yeah yeah good uh I think that’s cool I I take the exact opposite point of view for the record um I do not think about building things that are gonna last 15 100 years I think that’s really hard and I think it’s unnecessary I want to be the thing that lasts 50 or 100 years not uh an individual brand necessarily well you are the brand if that’s the way I think about it is this um it depends on how you want your career to go some people get really excited about building something and being a part of something and working on something for 30 years I get more excited about taking like sort of seven year chapter arcs of my life and be like cool I want to have five you know I only get One Life to Live um I want to experience all the things I want to ride all the rides and so I do a you know I did a a tour of Duty and I I lived in Australia and Indonesia and all these other places that was fun that was where the Great Adventure I moved to Silicon Valley in the heart of San Francisco and I tried to do the billion dollar startup thing now I’m doing this basically cash flowing business side of things and podcasting creating content I’m a content creator now that’s interesting uh that’s fun in a new way I’ll shift at some point uh you know you know seven years from now I’m not gonna be a content creator anymore or I’m gonna shift the content I’m gonna Create TV shows or a stand-up comedy set or something yeah but you do realize that’s all rooted I’m gonna like Jujitsu your ass you realize this is all rooted in the same [ ] which is like your BR it is a consistent brand and you are changing the monetization I might not even put my name on uh like my name is not always going to be front and center on everything when you’re a content creator it is but other times it’s not for me the more important thing is I’m not I’m not gonna Bank on people recognizing my brand in order to do something I do want to accumulate enough financial freedom and Runway so that I can go pursue things that don’t have to make money right away and um and so but but you know it’s all about what you the vision for you you have for yourself so that’s why I was talking about Rob Dyrdek has this vision for his house you have a vision for Hampton what you’re trying to create this is long-term enduring thing I have a vision for my my life or my career that is Chapters and episodic and I want to have that variety and new challenge where I have to like go become uncomfortable and try to get good at something new and learn a different you know sort of yeah go learn the dark arts of a different area of different different whole different industry and go become a beginner again that’s something I get excited about more so than creating one thing that’s going to last a long time or I’m going to be a part of for a long time is that a phrase we’re going to start using the dark arts I mean that’s patent is so yeah saying that right now um where do you want to go um let’s move on okay I got two quick ideas for you in general I want to say this by the way in this pod I think we’re going to make a shift in how we create the content so right now every episode is this mismatch of breaking down a business talking about Frameworks an idea business idea here or there I think what we’re going to start to do is segment them better or chunk them better theme the episode’s better so you know what you’re gonna get and we just go really hard at one thing so we’re gonna do episodes where it’s really hard on just ideas business opportunities that we see we’re gonna go really hard on certain topics like um one-man businesses or you know businesses that have very few people but just crush it it’s gonna be a lot harder for us to do the prep for that but I think it’ll make for much better episodes so uh we’ve been talking a bit about that I think we should put it out there that we want to we want to start doing that but until then let’s mismatch a little bit I got an idea for you so okay if you made a grid of customers that are easy to acquire or hard to acquire on one side and then customers that are not that valuable and super valuable on the on the other axes um one box that interests me there is hard to acquire Super valuable and the reason why is because those companies can become very very defensible very very valuable right your value as a company or even as a person is just based on how easy are you to replace you want to be Irreplaceable Irreplaceable that’s how you can actually make more money in the long term so what’s on that in that quadrant like uh like a [ ] plain manufacturer or something like that something that sells to government so you go get government contracts not easy hard might be hard to do might be boring to do long-term expensive government contracts it might take you years to get to the point where you can get one but when you get one very valuable and very defensible and so um I was thinking about this I was like what because I invested in this um drones company called valency a long time ago I’ve invested maybe many years ago I have no idea how they’re doing I was a small investor I don’t even get the updates but um at the time they were doing pretty well and they had a uh you know I was like okay well this valuation’s a little bit Rich for where you’re at but why is it you know why do you think this is the right valuation and it was like but they’re about to get this government contract that’s 100 million a year contract one one customer will now become worth more than all their customers combined because and what’s the term length of that contract I think it was like a there was a couple that they were up for I think they were like sort of three and five year deals something like that so it’s like okay these are huge deals that you can get and once you get one government contract you’re sort of de-risked and you’ve done all the you know the clearance and all that stuff you basically you have to get your company to a spot where you could get a government contract and once you have one being able to get the next one becomes more likely because you’re sort of in The Trusted vendor Circle so I was like oh that’s pretty valuable I was just thinking about one the other day you know with this whole covid pandemic somebody out there has got to be selling some kind of pandemic modeling software or detection software to every government in every country of the world and this is also have like a network effect where as soon as you provide you’re the provider of this product to uh one government it’s actually something that all governments would then choose you for because you know the more governments you get the more compelling your case becomes and so I wonder who’s building kind of the talent what palantir did for I think uh like National Security type stuff somebody’s got to be doing for biosecurity so who is creating the uh pandemic monitoring detection modeling awareness program that you can then go sell to every single government on Earth as an indefinite ongoing contract hey these things happen once every 100 years we have the Spanish Flu we got coveted all right I’m just gonna go I’ll be your provider because hey they’re devastating when they happen and I could I could be this for you for the next hundred years I think that’s a a hundred year company that uh is probably quite defensive and quite valuable if you can do it I’ll talk to some of my friends who work at Pelletier I’m like hey what’d you guys do today and they’re like oh just like uh stopped a terrorist attack in France how about you I wrote a blog post you know what I mean like until five tweet Tuesday today yeah my favorite Tweets in my newsletter it’s cool have you ever looked at it it’s like those uh have you ever worked at those there’s all these like net worth calculators where you’re like where will I be in 50 years and you’re like well if you were to start in like 1884 uh this is where you’d be if you were starting like 1995 this is where you’d be and you can like see like well because that this 50 year or this 30 years actually had slow growth this uh 10 years had fast growth and you could like see all the different scenarios you’re like so if we take the average it’s this but if this happens this so you’re kind of like talking about like that but with like potential illnesses who have you researched out there uh I haven’t researched any of this but I’m sure it already exists these sort of like uh you know like because people have been worried about these sort of like viral things but obviously they were insufficient right so like whatever existed obviously sucked because we didn’t detect it we didn’t have any plan for it and we had no idea how fast this thing was spreading like literally the best pandemic model I saw was made as a side project by Kevin Systrom the founder of Instagram for fun on the side where he’s like oh look I can break down by state they are not the viral coefficient basically of this of this virus uh based off of this public data I’m getting about hospitals and hospitalizations and um I can use that to kind of show which states are flattening the curve versus which states are about to go exponential and you know they should really consider doing something and it’s like somebody’s got to be doing this this got to be the easiest sales pitch of all time right now is kind of what I guess what I really mean it’s like if you’re sitting at MIT or one of these places just be like wear a sign that says I went to MIT and then go walk into the government building open up the fanciest like Matlab you know like model you could find and be like you need to pay for this and just see what happens I think I feel like they can get you can get pretty far right now with this pitch of like hey we’ll help you with the we’ll help you keep track of these viruses do you remember about two years ago you and I were both interested in people who are trying to detect fires uh forest fires do you remember that yeah yeah we did it we did this on the Pod right there was probably like one or two like kids like college kids fooling around with it but then there was like I think two different companies that raise money I think from Founders from fund and actually they were ex-palanteer guys I forget the name of the company it’s a four-letter word it was like gel or I forget what it was but they were I tried to invest in them and they were like they weren’t having it because they were uh getting big and they they didn’t need any money but do you know what happened to those guys uh felt maybe was it felt f-e-l-t um I don’t know the name of it that’s really hard to remember uh but no and I also don’t know what uh what came of it but yeah there was I remember when the California wildfires were happening I felt like every three months there was like a new fire and the entire like State of California was like covered in Smoke yeah I remember when that I remember when that was happening to find early detection of wildfires was like a like a startup idea that a bunch of people got funded for yeah it was really interesting what we need to do what I’ll do not this week but next week because we have Jack on next because I’m gonna actually do research and see how these guys are doing because it’s very similar to what you’re talking about but what was your uh what and what was your other thing that you were looking at you have this other thing the Celeb you’re going to go from selling to governments to selling to Jessica Simpson yeah exactly yeah not the same IQ so basically this next idea is so celebrities are having this like deep fake crisis uh crisis and opportunity so deep fakes are getting really really good and celebrities now have a crisis plus opportunity so the crisis is you’ve seen this fake Tom Cruise it’s deep fake Tom Cruise this guy’s like amazing it looks just like Tom Cruise and it’s like a video you know it’s this is getting really good you’re not going to be able to tell dude did you see did you see the do you see the ones where they put our podcast in Spanish yeah those are awesome by the way we should do that we should release our podcast and everything they were amazing they were so good I mean and I’ve heard of these new scams where they’ll take uh people whose voice and video you get access to and they call your parents I mean like Hey Dad look I’m trapped I need some money can you please send it like just don’t ask questions to send the money it’s wild it’s wild and so I think there’s an opportunity here so I think celebrities who get paid for their name and face and you know oh I gotta go fly to you know Arizona and shoot this commercial for Gatorade right now and it’s gonna be three days but I’m gonna get paid all this money blah blah that’s gonna change into Kindred would like to use your your AI clone in their commercial you cool with that yeah you get to sit at home and collect the check and it’s like maybe it’s 50 less you know expensive for the brand maybe it’s the same cost for the brand I don’t know but uh celeb you don’t have to do the work anymore that’s going to be a big deal so the more famous you get now you’re not gonna have to actually do the appearance thing because you’ll just send your your AI it’s not double to go do it so that’s an opportunity but there’s also a a risk there which is what if somebody’s just doing it without your consent and so I think somebody’s going to need to create a sort of celebrity deep fake licensing company so it’s a company that goes and says look we’re going to create the legal entity that’s going to house your name and likeness that other brands can come interact with when they want access to this and we’re also going to do the detection to find out is anybody doing the unauthorized use of your name and face somewhere um and we will handle all the takedowns for you so it’s kind of like a reputation.com but for this new deep fake thing so you basically will go and I think you’ll you need to it’s almost like Angel list you need to create the legal framework for how these work you need to go sell this to every agency and say hey you should we’ve created one for you know you have one of these for all of your your clients on your roster and when a brand comes to you use this to issue the license that has the rights and controls on it that has the digital encrypted watermark on it um that has the tracking on it and then we will also fight anybody who is trying to use it without paying you because that’s going to become an issue as well um that’s what I think is going to happen I think somebody can build that company right now I used to get all these emails when I first started the hustle because what we would do is we eventually bought a Getty’s license which is like 50 Grand a year but before that we would use I would just type in whatever picture I wanted and then I’ll go to Google and click like allow for commercial use and then I would like I would use those pictures on our website and then at once we got popular we would get all these emails from these patent trolls they’re not patent trolls I mean we were we were using someone else’s picture and they would say send us three grand and we’ll go away otherwise we’re suing you and I started looking into them and basically what they did was they just built this technology so they could detect if someone’s photo was being used and they would automatically like crawl they would use like who is and find out who the webmaster was and send you this email and I wonder like how those folks turned out like what’s going like how some of these people actually built those those things and if they were profitable I imagine so like there was one time I used someone’s picture it was like in the I think it was like the it was like a thumbnail picture it was the smallest picture and I didn’t even know we used it and I think maybe someone at our company took a screenshot of it and like tried to alter it and then put it on our website in the smallest way and they totally caught it and within like a few hours we had to send them like three thousand dollars it’s like [ ] they got us I wonder like what that looks like in the world of AI when you are having a bunch of these fake celebrity videos you know what I’m saying yeah yeah exactly so I think somebody’s gonna need to uh to to create the good version of that so one option has become the troll uh the other option is become the official sort of like broker of of these of the usage of these digital defects um all right so that’s my second one the company by the way is called felt f-e-l-t.com felt that was the it was uh that’s what we talked about remembering you want to talk about how you flew Ben out to convince him to move with you yeah I think it’s good actually because remote work is you know obviously all the rage and remote work is great in a bunch of different ways but I’m of the opinion which is uh remote is great when you have things figured out and you need people who are just operational to do things anytime there’s a lot of needs figuring out or creativity or just your brain trust I think works best in person and so I told Ben the other day I was like Ben I think we’re on to something with what we’re doing uh business partner Ben business partner Ben I was like you know he lives in Austin right now and I was like you gotta I was like you gotta move out here and he’s like oh but like you know I live here now and Life kid we have family in Texas I was like yeah I know but like you we both believe the following right um every time we get together magic happens um this can be pretty big like what we’re doing can become pretty big and so even like a 10 to 20 percent Improvement on uh what we’re doing is actually worth maybe tens of millions of dollars so it’s like you know it could be worth it to move um and California’s a great place too so it’s not like I’m saying you know let’s go to a rural Ohio or something and um and so he was like okay why do we do this so he moved out here for the month so he got an Airbnb in The Burbs or San Francisco and The Burbs where I’m at and he’s like I got an Airbnb brought his wife kid came out here he’s just been living here for the month and um and I also I offered him I was like dude I’ll pay you dollars which bleep that out um if you move and he was like and I but I told him I go but the number drops by 20 every quarter that you don’t move because I was like this is not like a standing offer forever it’s a burning it’s an exploding offer I said you should take your time you should think about it but you should also know every quarter that you don’t move that number goes down dude he should tell you you come you get your ass to Texas yeah no he knows I’m not going anywhere he knows I’m not going anywhere that’s not the that’s not the deal I actually lived in Texas for a long time uh and you know the other thing is like here in California you know in San Francisco there is kind of like for for example for our rolling fund there’s so many companies so many other investors so many people in the startup world like you want to be like proximity Is Power you want to be near as many other people as you can that are doing the same sorts of things as you as you are um to the extent that your lifestyle will allow it and so uh so yeah we’ll see he told me I think I think I got like a 10 to 20 chance well I’m coming out I was I was with him a week or two weeks before he went out there and I was shocked when he told me that he thought that there was maybe a 20 chance that he could be convinced and by he I mean the the levy entity uh the the household and I was shocked that it was 20 is it still 20 percent I don’t know I think so but uh we also work a lot when he’s here so I’m sure his wife’s like dude this is terrible like you work more now like oh man I don’t want to do this and so uh so that might be working against us the other thing though is uh the way we work is kind of goofy like um I don’t think most people do this but you know for coding they have pair programming it’s not that popular but some people do it what pair programming is I I think what’s the name of that agency that was in San Francisco that was like a really popular Dev shop uh it was like it like went public at one point you know you know the name uh yeah yeah I don’t remember it but yeah they popularized it at least I don’t know if they invented or popularized it but basically it’s two programmers working on one computer you know right it’s like the uh the engineering two girls one cup basically it’s like you sit together there’s one keyboard and you would think well okay you have half the efficiency like only one guy’s working only one guy’s coding but actually you get more than double the efficiency because it keeps you completely focused and you and your partner are basically both talking things through it figuring things out on the Fly and literally me and Ben do that when he comes out here to work we I’m like all right put your laptop down like just we buddy up side by side at this desk and we’ll just work on the same thing at the same time and like I can’t just like open Twitter and start messing around over there what’s happening what are you doing can’t you can’t just say open new tabs you know uh as you’re figuring something out one of the guys pointing something out you just sort of really stacking uh that’s why I call like stacking Focus it’s like whatever my level of focus is plus is a level of focus on the same thing so that’s been good the other is the in between time so already when we work remote we call each other all the time uh you know probably on the phone two hours a day three hours a day maybe on calls either with others or just ourselves but what’s happening now is we’ll work on something for a bit that’s kind of like us being on a call together working on something and then we’re like all right let’s go get food and we’ll just hop on our bikes we’ll go to this taco shop we go get this we go to the same taco shop every day we get the same same meal every day we play waffle ball afterwards hold the hands if we skip home basically but while we’re doing it it’s sort of like the best ideas are coming out uh in all the in-between time and that’s the time where normally if we’d be like okay bye close Zoom or close Google hangouts or whatever and then you know I put on a podcast and he does something else and you know it’s the in-between time where you get the serendipitous ideas um so it just kind of reminding me how valuable it is to work in person so here’s here’s the issue that you have or I’ve always had with you which is whenever I’m around you whenever I am around you both of us are high high-ish energy people where you’re the type of person that eggs people on and then I’ll egg you back on or I could see like and I’m not even that bad at that but you do I’m sure there’s a lot of other people like Suli where you guys just start egging each other on and it’s like wait a minute we’re totally off track here we should just do the same thing over and over again does this having him around just distract you further because I can see you guys just like you’re sitting on two like love seats and you’re throwing a football back and forth and you’re like why don’t we do this yeah what if we did this it’s like well [ ] it let’s just do it right now it’s definitely a part of it okay every single day that’s like that I crumple up a piece of paper I throw it to him he throws it back and we’re playing catch talking about [ ] that like you know things we could do that are not like just the obvious things but the beauty of it is as I’ve gotten older and I’ve gotten wiser and I’ve been doing this podcast two things have happened one I hang around you and you’re very good at just doing the thing every day whether it’s your workout or it’s whatever I’m just gonna do the thing and I don’t want to get distracted by everything I just want to do the thing as I hang out with you is how it helps there was also a guy who came on the podcast long time ago one of the earliest episodes and he designed it’s he’s from Peak design they make these like camera bags so he started his company sad that was two years ago yeah this was like one of the first 15 episodes I think and um he uh he so he makes these camera bags who knew and they do like I don’t know at the time like 70 million a year in Revenue off of camera bags and I was and like clips for your DSLR camera I was like what the hell is this that big of a market and he had done it off of Kickstarter and he kind of inspiring guy and uh as I was talking to him I go so what’s your philosophy around business he goes he goes everybody’s got these like plans they got these ideas blah blah blah he goes I think it’s like life and business is just a six inches in front of your face he’s like it’s just this it just held up his hand six inches before he goes I just look at this and I just do the six inches in front of my face that’s all I’m focused on and I just do that every day and that stuck with me and so we have you can’t see it but on the wall here I wrote six inches in front of our face on a giant like post uh like a giant sticky pad thing these things are great by the way you should buy these these uh giant sticky pad things where you sort of tear the paper it’s like a huge Post-It note that goes on your wall dude at Monkey Inferno your old office you are like that guy you always had white boards and like pads that was your thing you were always standing up like writing yeah that was you you always said that yeah whiteboard sesh real quick so so yeah I have it here and it says the six inches in front of our face and so the first thing we do every day when he comes over is we re-prioritize the six inches in front of our face it’s like what are the small no-brainer steps forward that will make this like one percent better today and we the first three hours of the day we don’t do anything else besides knock those out and um I think theoretically we could just do that for eight hours a day I would get bored out of my mind also I can kind of get eight hours of work done in three hours of focus when I put my mind to it and so that’s what we do first and then for the rest of the day we think okay what what else could LeapFrog something forward Beyond those one percent obvious improvements so we knock out anything anything we can think of that’s a one percent obvious Improvement the six inches in front of our face first and so that’s how we’ve been able to stay focused our software is the worst have you heard of HubSpot see most crms are a cobble together mess but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous I think I love our new CRM our software is the best HubSpot grow better dude you shared something on Twitter about uh what’s this football player’s name Russell Russell okong yeah oh my God so I’m not a football I’m not a sports guy at all so I didn’t even know who this person was and you shared this thing this basically who is he he was he was he good yeah he was awesome he was a former lineman so linemen are you like the biggest guys on the football field so he’s you know probably I don’t know 300 pounds or something like that uh he’s like six five he’s he’s six five 310 pounds when he plays yeah and he was like a star like he won he like won a Super Bowl ring he was a pro bowlers awesome awesome player um I remember I think he was playing on the Seahawks for a while that’s that’s kind of what I remember him uh he’s now on Twitter there’s a couple of these athletes like and Dominican Sue um Russell okung that are like they’re kind of like on Tech Twitter somehow like and so Russell and you could DM him and they’ll and he’s he’s been replying to my DMs yeah like Matthew dellavedova invited me to an event the other day I was like this is so cool that they’ve crossed over and they’ve got their athlete Camp they’ve also got kind of business Tech uh interest and there they like the by the way the best thing about it is they come in so humble um which is like they uh they don’t like they don’t come in with this like well you know who I am personality like this Saturday so we do I started this basketball pickup game every Saturday for Founders and investors out here in the East Bay and we rent this gym and then we we all just play pick up for like three hours and uh Zaza pachulia came and he’s uh he’s a former player on the Warriors and he oh really he tweeted like oh yeah I’ll uh I’ll play and I didn’t invite him to the first one because I thought he was joking when he replied and then he emailed me after the first was like bro what happened I didn’t get the information no way I was like no way oh [ ] you actually were gonna show up and so he came this week and it was [ ] awesome dude like not awesome at basketball obviously he’s also a basketball compared to us but he um Zaza is is it like a big Russian looking guy or I don’t know where he’s from where is he from I don’t know Serbia or I think he’s from I think he’s from Serbia I’m not 100 he’s just Google it Georgia Georgia he’s uh yeah he’s like seven foot uh and he’s just he’s a beast and so now he works for the war yours he does like their business side their operating basketball operations and investing uh for them and uh he’s just super personable super funny guy like was totally humble and like you know did he play yeah he played with us for three hours it was once it was amazing um I was talking so much trash to him and he was just such a good sport about it it was amazing so yeah I just I gotta say I was so I’ve been so impressed with the way that kind of like the athletes I’ve seen that crossover into business and Tech they like they do it with with like I don’t know so much finesse it’s really impressive wait what did you learn about I love seeing pro athletes in real life and just like seeing them joke around or like behind the scenes Instagram videos where they’re like hey watch this I bet you I can jump over this thing they jump over this like huge thing you’re like oh my God these people like we’re not the same type of person was there any athletic attributes that he had or was he just totally chilling well yeah for sure I mean if you see Zaza play in the NBA Zaza was basically like a screen center like his number one skill was he could set a huge pick to get Steph Curry a shot but when he played against us right he’s Steph Curry he’s just draining shots from all over the court you he didn’t even take these shots in the NBA you never saw him take these shots and he’s just and he made all of them fast break pulling up from the three-point line and he has I was like when’s the last time you played he’s like 2019. I was like no way he’s like no no I’ve shot around he’s like you know I’m in the basketball facility so I shoot around but he’s like I I don’t even know last time I like played it like I can’t like it kind of like a competitive game and uh so a couple things so his warm-up was like a real warm-up like he like he’s talking but he’s doing these like hip flexor openers and I’m like oh yeah he’s like he’s just he’s actually an athlete he’s had to like get his body ready many many many times over and so you see like a bunch of the dudes who come in and it’s like yo here’s this VC or here’s this like Tech founder and we’re like I don’t know I guess Tyler touched my toes is that what I do to warm up like we don’t know we don’t even know what to don’t even know what to do to warm up whereas he’s like doing these like uh you know hip openers the second thing is when he played obviously his game is a lot better than you see on TV because you know where the competition is so you you gotta you gotta be a star in your role in the NBA and he was a star in his role as this like paint protector screen Setter here he could do a lot of other things that he never got to show there uh the other thing is like he was like a bear so he was mostly you know just playing point guards passing the ball mostly um like getting everything obviously he could post any of us up he’s got a foot on all of us you know in terms of height so he wasn’t just abusing that but when it but like we beat him the first game and then they won like six straight and then you beat him you beat his team yeah we won the first game yeah they were just like you know whatever we got after a quick start but then the they went on a 6-0 run or something like that just crushing everybody and then when we came back out to try to beat them as a very competitive game and then it’s like we poked the bear it’s like all of a sudden he started driving to the hoop and he started like playing like aggressive it’s like oh yeah don’t forget the bear can kill you uh the bear might be nice right now but the bear will let you know that like I could kill you if I wanted to and he just chose which style he was gonna yeah he’s like let’s let’s just put it to a six now we wear the three let’s just put it we’ll just put it out of six just for a few minutes don’t get it twisted this has been a three up till now I’m just gonna show you that then I’ll go back down wow that’s awesome um that I love seeing those types of people like just like in normal settings um and so um talk about Russell so what Russell’s doing I I saw him you shared it he has his website and it’s here’s why it’s interesting one he’s we’ll put this we’ll see what he’s doing he’s doing a 40-day water fast that alone is interesting but what’s even more interesting is he’s doing it in a very like I wouldn’t have expected this like six foot five 300 pound football player to be so introspective and if you go to his website do you know the name of his website actually no I will have it in front of me if you just Google his name and then go to his Twitter and you can click off to the link he’s got this website hey it’s built on ghost which is like a pretty like in the know nerdy web platform I think it’s okungfast.com is at least where the I think that’s where the that’s where you posted if you just Google it you’ll see it but it’s like a yellow website and like he has email pop-up pop-ups and like everything is set up really actually like exactly how it should be like the email pop-up is like thoughtful and then you go to a confirmation page that’s thoughtful and he’s blogging every single day and he’s posting the same picture every day so as of now I think he started this thing at 260. I have to know I think we buried the lead so he’s he’s gone he’s going on a 40-day water only fast he’s lost a hundred pounds so far doing it and obviously it’s not just about the weight loss it’s about like sort of like the mental Challenge and the mental Clarity that he’s getting as he’s doing this like you know sort of this this very uh it sounds to me like a really intense fast I think he’s on day 21. well he talks about how it’s a spiritual thing and he basically like he he’s just so much more thoughtful than I ever would have picked this guy just because I’m stereotyping like an NFL player and like his writing is very good and very clear and there’s a lesson that he’s learning each day and he talks about that and everything’s well written it’s just wonderful it’s a really really cool fourth day was the hardest he goes because this is where the body is transitioning into a new state so he’s like I had headaches fatigue my body was transitioning to using fat as the energy source rather than you know the in the input of new uh you know carbohydrates and whatever and he looks good so you could see even when he started it you look at day one where he started he still looked uh pretty lean now you look at him at day one he’s starting to get like skinnier and skinnier and skinnier and his writing is starting to change it’s very fascinating and he’s been tweeting about it every day as he goes I need to blogging about I think it’s awesome I love seeing this right uh yeah and he’s also like he’s on day 21 he’s on day 21. he’s also like a Bitcoin Max he’s an interesting guy by the way there’s a a guy I met named Byron Jones who retired this year um he was like one of the best cornerbacks in the in the in the league and he retired I think at 30. so he came into the league probably 21-22 and he retired at 30 which is an early retirement and he got paid very well probably made like I don’t know 80 million dollars playing in the NFL but he had said something when he retired which is that I can’t run or jump anymore and which is shocking because this is like one of the most athletic guys that was in the NFL at the time when he was playing and I went to a dinner he had a 44 inch ver wow 44 inch ver and now he’s just hit broad jump um freak my buddy Romine uh hosts this event called game time every year in LA and it’s basically a mix of investors and athletes that get together and so I’ve gone the last couple years and he hosts this dinner and at the dinner there was a few NFL players on the table and they all mentioned like uh I forgot what they were called a torbital not torbital it’s not the steroid it’s like some shot that NFL players get basically it’s a pain pain tolerance shot a pain reduction shot painkiller and they’re they were just like dude that shot it’s like magic and it’s a curse they’re like because it doesn’t make you feel better right it just makes you not feel pain no no you feel better but sorry it doesn’t cure an injury but it doesn’t cure the underlying issues it’s like you he’s like we would go from you know Sunday you play uh Monday you feel bad Tuesday you feel like man I was in a car accident and their body feels like it was in a car accident you’re like there’s no way I’m gonna be able to practice on Thursday and play next Sunday like that’s just like where my body’s at on Tuesday versus Sunday seems crazy and they said that like uh they’re like man that you know like the culture in the NFL is like you got to play obviously and so these like a lot of guys get get in the habit of taking this one shot T something I forgot what it’s called and they take the shot and they’re like it’s like a miracle dude like within an hour you’re running again and they’re like you went from not you know like limping to like you’re just back to you but also every time you do it it’s like taking time you know it shortens your career because this is so bad for your body what you’re actually doing to your body when you do that is you’re not like it’s not like the underlying tissues have healed in the process and um it’s kind of a crazy thing so I think one cool thing about Russell’s doing is he’s basically like trying to rewind the clock on you know when you’re in when you’re alignment they tell you to beef up and what he’s doing is is doing a sort of a rapid and drastic change in his physiology in order to get his weight down so that he can live a little you know longer healthier life as he goes yeah he said I went through a pulmonary embolism I don’t know what that is is that a heart thing uh I had lacerated lungs no idea how you get lacerated lungs but that’s wild a series yeah a series of surgeries ligament and ligament and tendon damage and getting up every day was just really hard I thought magically when I finished playing it would get easier but it got harder harder I had completely depleted my testosterone so he basically just explains he’s like I was left in shambles and so that’s I guess one of the reasons why he’s done this and I think it’s really really really cool I don’t think I’m gonna do it shout out to him I like I like seeing him do it what else you got um I like this question I got so a guy tweeted at me I want to get your take on it so his name’s Christian vanufel uh great name so Christian says question for you Sean he goes what work seems like small boy stuff but actually packs a punch so we have this phrase we say on the Pod all the time no small boy stuff and we don’t even like spend a ton of time defining it because honestly it’s always stuff is kind of obvious but I would say the general buckets of small boy stuff would be um you know overly worrying about things um small boy stuff would be thinking small rather than thinking big thinking short term rather than thinking long term um you know caring too much about what other people think of you you know there’s a whole bunch of things that you classify as small boy stuff like complaining when things get hard uh or things don’t go your way complaining in general waiting in general these are all like small boy moves but I thought his question was great because the magic is in things that other people think are small but actually pack a punch and I had an answer but I’m curious what your answer would be I’ll give you you want me to go first you want to go first I’ll give a very quick example we had our I keep talking about the offsite my CEO the company he put all this effort into creating like little individual awards for people and like writing like uh appreciation notes and like being very thoughtful in the itinerary and I was like dude just like who gives a [ ] let’s just get in the room and hang out he put all this work into it spent hours and hours and hours 100 worth it I I was giving him a hard time and then afterwards I go nope you were right I was wrong that that is an example of things that seem below your pay grade that you you proved it was worth it love it uh I would actually also give you credit because that would be one of my answers which is um admitting when you’re wrong openly and quickly I remember hearing a story about um one of the guys at Sequoia who’s awesome uh like helped build Sequoia into like the most successful VC brand or one of the most in a long time somebody asked like what makes him great they go all he cares about is getting it right he’ll be in a meeting with you he’ll say his opinion and somebody else will say their opinion and you know most people either start to debate or uh like we’re kind of like it’s like we’re talking past each other it’s like I’m talking about one thing you’re talking about another and I’m the boss so I’m gonna get my way and he’s like he’s the first guy he has this phrase he always says well he’ll go okay nope I like your way better let’s go with that um like nope that’s better like let’s go with that is a uh a awesome small but big thing you could do as a leader in any company it sets the culture that it’s not about who’s right it’s about getting it right getting to write you know over time um here’s what I wrote as some of my answers I said small things that seem like small boy stuff is actually big doing customer service yourself early on so being on the front lines um answering customer service emails uh questions feedback picking up the phone all that stuff um manually onboarding your first 10 or 100 users so um literally yourself sitting there with them you know going to sit side by side with them and having them install your product or on board onto your product and and answering their questions seems like an unscalable small boy way of just spending your time actually no it’s a huge huge thing and it’ll teach you a lot about your product and your Market um sending follow-ups follow-ups following up with somebody who didn’t answer you always feels like you know like a little low status [ ] move but it packs a big punch follow-ups are where all the magic is and I think there’s also a big piece of follow-ups which is a lot of people don’t follow up because they don’t hear back and they assume they say they’re saying no they don’t like me they hate they hate this idea uh you don’t want to look stupid they get in their head about it they start assuming the worst instead assume the obvious people are busy and they forget uh people are busy and didn’t get around to it yet um and when you follow up with that mindset that’s the sort of no small boy mindset it’s like I’m offering something of value to this person of course they would want it maybe they haven’t yet seeing the value in it maybe I didn’t convey properly or they just haven’t gotten around to it they’re busy and that’s okay um I’m still here um the other one I wrote was finding things that recurred daily and making them two percent better because daily things that you do things you do with high frequency compound um if you made them slightly better and so this is where I think a lot of people are like why are you optimizing for your shoes or your mattress or your pillow or whatever like why are you why do you care so much about how you’re uh you know like I’m a stickler for how a meeting starts I’m always like no no at the start of every meeting we say all right the purpose of this meeting is this and a good outcome of this meeting would be you know why and um if you can’t say X and Y like we’re not doing the meeting I’ll stop people and I’ll say no no do this or uh when people talk I’ll be like hey you know you’re talking a really low voice and you’re not sitting up straight like can you just do it like say it with some energy it’ll make a difference and like but that’s every meeting then people know that’s how we do meetings and so once you teach me how we do meetings we’re gonna have a lot of meetings at this company so we’re gonna make them better we’re not just gonna have shitty meetings let them let them slide so finding recurring things and making them slightly better because it’ll compound over time so that was mine what was your partner’s name at Monkey Inferno um furcon uh furcon I think was like I don’t know him well but I could only I could hang out with him for 30 seconds and I could just tell he’s the man at seeing redundancies or not redundancies uh seeing things that you do over and over and over again and be like yeah we’re gonna get rid of that and we’re gonna fix it by doing this this and this and it seems like you’re like dude you’re just slowing us down what are you doing he’s like no no you got to go fast to go slow or you got to go slow to go fast he seems like that type of Personality did he do that all the time he was definitely um he had you know the Hacker’s laziness which was like I’m not gonna do something unless I’m unless it’s clear that it’s gonna that it matters like I’m just gonna do [ ] just to do [ ] that’s the first thing um second thing I’m not gonna do the same thing every day if I if I’m doing it if I have to do it multiple times I’m automating this and same thing he would look around and be like yo what’s Sean do what’s Jason doing like are the non-technical people and he’d be like hey Neil you see Jason keeps what he’s doing is he’s going and finding each person manually on Twitter you should just scrape this whole list put it in a database and and copy paste this code snippet so that he could put that on his machine so that he could just have his leads ready so he can go faster he would do a lot of stuff like that like he told a story early at Apples App 11 was a mobile ad tech company that um is now worth billions of dollars he was the co-founder of it and what for Khan told me a story he’s like yeah Adam the CEO he’s like one thing he really cared about was his dashboard like what does our dashboard look like so that I have visibility and he’s like he’s like I kind of watched Adam to see like is there really any value out of this or is he just you know sometimes CEOs just have pet projects they just want to look nice and he’s like is it that or is there value here so he shattered him he’s like all right I’m not going to sit on my computer instead of your computer you show me what are you looking at with this dashboard what do you do with it and so he showed him and he’s like yeah I do I look at this I look at this and that tells me who we need to go after um for these deals and I need to figure out how much to offer them so that I can get them faster like you know instead of just saying you should work with us for these features if I just make a monetary offer that’s better than their current ad Network they’ll switch and he’s like okay so you need to figure out this list you need this data and then you need to know a projection of how much we can make with them so you can offer less than that but still more than what they’re probably making for their current ad Network and I should show you which what the current ad network is in this dashboard I’ll just figure that out by looking at their SDK blah blah blah hey look he basically put together this like command center for the CEO and he’s like he basically built a sales tool rather than working on features of the product he’s like I’m gonna build you something and so what they did was they would go to a developer they say you should use our ad Network and they’re like I already have an ad Network he said cool I’m guessing your ad Network pays you nine dollar CPM and they’re like yeah something like that he said cool we’ll pay you 22 dollars is it how can you do that uh don’t worry there are ad networks better I consider the convention right networks better but I’ll just sign this paper that says we’re already going to pay you 20 no matter what like I’m just confident it’s going to perform because I know our ad networks better and they’re like okay he’s like but here’s you know you got to switch and we have these two Engineers standing here next to me they’re gonna help you switch today and then they would just and they just rolled through the ad Market because they were able to go to people and make them no-brainer offers how did they make them no-brainer offers they because they had this Command Center internally that was how big is this app what are they currently using how much are they currently making how much do we think we can make off them and then how do we have a a spread there that we can work with and so I thought that that was a great example of for con uh figuring out how to make the company successful in a way that most Engineers would not do because most Engineers just want to work on product and not even product like the under the hood parts of the product which is like even worse than making the product better dude this is the most wholesome episode we’ve done in like two months talking about like CEOs fighting each other and [ __ ] no one’s making no one’s getting made fun of we’re totally aligned lots of take-home value here this is this is a uh this is like the most wholesome thing we’ve done in a long time I actually am like I feel like I’m learning this is this episode was good because I’m sitting here in a notebook taking notes I’m learning that’s a good some learning yeah I love that well that’s it that’s the episode good pod foreign