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Kind: captions Language: en I mean how many times have has has someone proposed something everyone’s like h i don’t get it but then someone else is like look what this is really about is blah blah blah everyone’s like oh that sounds great that I want well you just said you know it’s not bad information it’s bad presentation I made my whole career doing [Music] that all right Jason we’re live this is how we start we just jumped right into it can I give the can I give my like brag about you intro of what I know about you and then you can kind of correct anything that I get wrong of course we have Jason Cohen so Jason Cohen originally started you had a bunch of smaller businesses but in the early 2000s you started was it called uh it’s just called smart bear or smarter Bear Just Smart bear that was 22 years ago believe it or not smart so 22 years ago you started smart bear you grew it for like seven years bootstrapped it making millions of dollars in profit sold it that company now has a thousand plus employees has sold recently or traded recently for like two billion is that right yeah it actually doesn’t have that many employees it’s more like hundreds which is part of why it’s impressive because it’s yeah it was sold in 2020 for two billion and it doesn’t have a th000 employees it’s super profitable like it was publicly said then um what the profits were it’s 50% bottom line profit God so just just a a printing a cash printing machine then you started WP engine of which I’m a customer of WP engine is one of the large web hosting companies in the world uh that company you bootstrap for two or three years then you now you’ve raised I think2 or $300 million it makes many hundreds of millions of dollars it’s worth billions of dollars and all along the way you’ve been blogging at uh as smartbear.com I’ve been reading that for years you are not the loudest person and that’s the reason why I wanted to have you on is because you’re not the loudest person but anyone who’s like in the thick of it and trying to build great companies everyone reads your blog like the the the the 1% the 1% read your blog you’ve got a really good audience of people actually building it and the reason I like you is you and daresh are a little bit of the same personality to me there’s like this Vin diagram and it’s like it’s like people who are wildly successful like we’re talking billionaire successful but then also are just do [ ] just because it’s fun and at the same time have this weird like logical way of thinking but then can like disregard that logical way of thinking and just do what’s cool and what’s exciting which is really rare to have someone who’s both an engineer but also understands like ah [ ] it I’m just going to do it because this is cool and you do that so like Sean he just dm’d me on Twitter and I was like dude I just got this automated DM from you he’s like oh yeah I built this script that automatically DMS everyone who follows me on Twitter so he’s that type of guy where like he’s got like a thousand projects that he will never even talk about but it’s like a little thing that he had to get on the weekend but you also have WP engine which is this massive unicorn and so that’s why we wanted to have you on the Pod well yeah I mean WP engine’s a like one of the top 10 web Platforms in the world and then you’re also tinkering with like these DM autod DM scripts because you’re like yeah this is useful I like this and so that’s the that combo we’ve we’ve come to find is a really good fit with us on the Pod somebody who has ambition in scale but also is a tinkerer at heart I want to talk to you about some different ideas so check this out Sean uh on your computer and Jason if you have a computer do this too go to z. apppp so it’s the word deck but with the Z so zeec doapp okay so it says zeex reimagine how CEOs collaborate with their board you scroll down whose face is that yeah Ed Norton Ed Norton the actor is the founder of this company that’s funny he’s I believe he’s like if you Google like this company Zack and you see like them doing presentations on CNBC and [ ] like that he’s talking he’s the founder of this company dude I just booked a demo call in 45 minutes just in case it’s Ed Norton who’s going to I just might get a free call with Ed Norton this might be great if it’s not Ed Norton I’m immediately hanging up this Zoom I saw an interview with him and he said he’s super active but these guys are they’re like I guess Ed Norton’s father I think was like business person and he was a raised around business and he uh he was I saw him give this interview and he was like yeah the thing about when I work with all these companies I invested is they’re horrible at telling me back the story they’re horrible at giving a presentation and I so I just I wanted to create software that would just help them be better at that at telling the story explaining how the company’s going and to make our meetings more productive and to teach them how to do presentation and I think this company I don’t know if it’s software yet I think it’s still a service I’m not I’m not entirely sure uh but I I saw this site and I was like what the [ ] is Ed Norton doing on this little like software site but Ed Norton is this is his company doing it and you know it’s not just the experience of the viewer and and just wanting people’s time to not be wasted which it also is that but it’s also more compelling like if you’re trying to propose something if you do a better job it’s more likely that it’ll happen I mean how many times have has someone provoked post something everyone’s like h i don’t get it but then someone else is like look what this is really about is blah blah blah everyone’s like oh that sounds great that I want well you just said you know like what I mean that’s just bad present it’s not bad information it’s bad presentation I made my whole career doing that well yeah we have like we have these college we have these college kids come on once a year twice a year and they like pitch their company and Sean’s very good at hearing what they said he goes that’s actually a great idea you’ve explained it horribly here’s how I would retell that and you will tell this beautiful story and then everyone’s jaw is dropping and we’re like yeah we’re in and uh he does that all the time he’s very good at that you know we’ve done pitch competitions at Capital Factory for 15 or 16 years and it always goes like that so can AI magically fix it all I don’t know about that but like Could It Could It Go from like negative 10 to at least like a two out of 10 you know maybe well I think you said three I I thought of three interesting things while you were talking I think you you prompted three really interesting ideas the first is you’re right that most decks are terrible and they’re not and everybody attacks us from a how do we make the slides fancier pre’s like hey what if you were hangliding while you were looking at the slide deck it’s like no no prey just chill out it’s not that’s not what we need and other people pitch is like you know what what if a designer just designed everything it’s like cool but the actual message is the the part that’s out of order jumbled up and unclear it’s foggy and that’s why this deck is no good not because the background color needs to be soft pastel pink and so you you start to look at this and one thing that I’ve done is uh whenever somebody on my team makes a presentation I inevitably will try to like try to make it better and the easiest way to make it better is just to ask a couple of questions right like a couple of simple questions one is like if people are going to remember one thing from this presentation what should it be what’s what is the number one takeaway oh it’s the thing on slide 37 cool let’s make that slide one and then that thing you want them to take away let’s make that the title right like that that’ll be the title of that slide and you just sort of go on you know you ask like five questions and you can make a presentation much better with five questions I’ve also started using AI in this way so instead of going to Ai and basically go to chat GPT instead of asking a question and getting an answer which I think is how most people use it I’ll go to chat GPD and I basically say I’m trying to do x uh but I’m not sure where to start what are some questions like ask me some questions so that I could start thinking about this the right way and it’ be like well it seemed like you know we did this when we we did an episode where we were picking us we did a fake like stock of paloa we’re picking a stock it’s like pick one stock that you know just like for fun like we’re all horrible stock Pickers but let’s do it just for fun and I went and I I wrote that how should I be thinking about this like well if you’re picking a stock what you want to do is this right and you might want to ask yourself the following questions what’s an area I really know about what’s a thing that I really believe in what am I looking for something short-term or longterm right and it asked me a bunch of questions that made me get more clear and I think if AI was going to do anything it would what it wouldn’t do is just take my input and make it better it would actually stop stop me before I even vomit and it would just say cool let’s just establish a couple of ground you know how long is this supposed to be absolutely getting getting interviewed and getting interviewed by it makes a lot of sense especially if it has some context of what you’re saying and so the the questions can be even more pointed another thing I’ve heard once which I really like I haven’t used this a lot but it’s it’s neat which is one thing that AI is good at right now is just giving you the Bland neutral summary of the topic right it definitely can do that so if you ask it for the Bland neutral summary the topic it will tell you the most obvious boring stuff so that’s what you don’t say it’s like a negative space so like well this isn’t interesting anything that’s not this might be interesting now maybe that’s on you to think of what that is but maybe there’s some like multi-step process where the AI could be like H okay I heard all their crap now I’m gonna go ask myself what the then I’m gonna go try to find the stuff that they said that’s not in there then I’m going to try to enhance that then I’m going to try to build like maybe a multi-step I could do that maybe not again there’s a lot of maybe and could have I know but if it were obvious and easy it wouldn’t be a good startup idea this has to be something a good startup idea has to be at least somewhat difficult to pull off you know so you have a little running start anyway that’s interesting and then the second thing is you said about titles that’s a huge pet peeve of mine I I agree completely people will say uh they’ll they’ll use the title to label what is on the page which is usually not useful because I can see what’s on the page it should be the message you want them to take from that one slide that should be the title so it shouldn’t say our team I can see it’s our team because there’s three heads and their stuff let’s just say something like you know our team has had three successful exits or our team has to collect you know Collective 30 years of experience is the most boring thing you could say but at least it’s something you know like what is it that you want me to know about the team that’s so special that’s what the title again AI could prompt or even force that and it also then helps your it goes the other way too now it helps your narrative oh yeah so I should put on the screen where we all went to college and stuff I shouldn’t read that I should talk about the title which says we’ve had two exits so I should say yeah we exited this thing in this space this thing and that space and we work together there we’ve been through the trenches that’s why this this team is totally drisk in terms of people which you don’t see every day so we have plenty of risk but the team’s not one of them whoa that’s a good that’s a good thing to say on a team slide to an investor Investor’s like okay tick like I I don’t quite believe you that there’s no risk but like I’m with you I’m with you this isn’t when I’m gonna lose sleep over it I love that um you know that should be the title so like AI could help and that goes both ways uh and and if you don’t have good titles you could say what should what do you really want to say here oh let’s make a title this long okay now let’s go back to the text this is something you could be prompted for and any presentation is improved if you do that all right everyone a quick break to tell you about HubSpot and this one’s easy because I’m going to show you an example of how I’m doing this at my company when I say I I mean not my team I mean I’m the one who actually made this so I’ve got this company called Hampton you can check it out join hampton.com it’s a community for Founders and one of the ways that we’ve grown is we’ve created these surveys where we’ll ask our members certain questions that a lot of people a lot of times people are afraid to ask so things like what their net worth is how their assets are allocated all these like interesting questions and then we’ll put it in a survey and I went and made a landing page so you can check it out at join hampton.com wealth you can actually see the landing page that I made and the hard part with this is with Hampton we are appealing to a sort of a a higher end customer sort of like like a Louis Vuitton or Ferrari so I needed the landing page to look a very particular way HubSpot has templates that’s what we use we just change the colors a little bit to match our brand very easy they have this drag and drop version of their Landing Page Builder and it’s super simple I’m not Technical and I’m the one who actually made it and once it’s made I then shared it on social media and we had thousands of people see it and thousands of people who gave us their information and I can then see over the next handful of weeks this is how much revenue came in from this wealth survey that I did this is where the revenue came from so it came from Twitter it came from LinkedIn whatever it came from I can actually go and look at it and I can say oh well that worked that didn’t work do more of that do less of that and if you’re interested in making landing pages like this I highly suggest it look I’m actually doing it but you can check it out go to the link in the description of YouTube and get started all right now back to MFM here’s what’s funny is that you know I’ve no idea if you are but you you might be a billionaire or you’re in that realm and you’ve started multi-billion dollar companies we asked you about ideas the idea that you spent most on is on how you manage Twitter I find that to be hilarious give us the second idea your your so your Twitter social media management tool idea yeah well it’s not just Twitter like part of what’s neat about it is uh I the same tool does LinkedIn and threads and uh and uh Mastodon which isn’t isn’t really working but okay here’s some stuff I think is is special and and also other people could just do this even manually if you want so one is um there’s certain people that I uh that I want to have more interactions with so I have them in a Twitter list because then you can search for it right but I do a search where it’s the P people on that list and they’ve posted in the last 20 minutes which is a pretty small window and there might be a couple of things like they have some favorites or I don’t know some whatever okay and I’ll look at that and sometimes there’s nothing in it sometimes just one or two but I’ll try to if it’s relevant to me then I’ll respond somehow and because it was just it just got posted it’s much more likely that they will respond or see it also if it’s a good comment like if I spend time making it really good then their followers who might see this over the course of the next 10 hours they may see my comment and upload it I may be one of those comments near the top that ends up with a lot of likes and maybe some follows I’ve seen times where I have the follow B because of a reply to someone with a lot of other followers right by doing it early I get that so if I just scanned everybody that time frame is important so it really focuses my attention on that so I spend almost no time on this and yet I have this big outsized impact of what those what those are whether I’m talking to that person or the supplies um so that’s something you can just take like my system does that but you can just take that the other effect it has which is funny is people are like dude you’re always online like I saw daresh post and like bam you were there like in two minutes what they don’t know is yeah but I see like 1 15th of what dares posts it’s just whatever it happens to be exactly what he posted I’ll see it so you your perception is quote unquote I’m always online but the fact is no it’s this trick and so it’s like a really funny trick that that has that effect why do you care why do you care because you you you had you had this one thing well no I I asked that because you wrote this other thing that I totally agree with so uh let me let me say it this way I have a bunch of buddies that are very successful you have no idea who they are they’ll see me get popular on Twitter and they go hey Sam can you uh can you help me write some tweets and I’m like dude why who gives a [ ] like you you’re winning who cares about this he go I don’t know it seems fun so I so I help him write some stuff and every once in a while it’ll go viral and they get whatever and they get addicted to it and I’m like dude don’t get addicted to this get addicted to the thing you’re already doing that’s way better and you have you have this post or it was a sentence somewhere in one of your blog posts where you’re like uh I actually think that people who have audiences that then launch software products to those audiences I think that’s really dumb because they’re actually not going to get that they’re not going to get that many customers that doesn’t work but that’s not why I’m doing it I’m not I’m not launching another product because of social media okay so then why do you care so I mean when I followed you I got an automated DM from you you told me that you built to do that why do you care about building something like this for social media it’s strictly for fun now what I have done for even longer than WP engine is right and so that is at this point just a part of who I am and I get a lot of fulfillment out of it and like you said you’re like wow there’s a lot of good stuff here um every time I hear that it feels good and also it’s really just the craft of it like I like to try to get the thoughts that I have as clear as possible or as interesting as possible but there’s so much that gets triggered that way that’s useful to me and fun for me too and Sam sent me this blog post that you wrote that I loved um and I think it’s called Rich vers King and this is great because we talk about money and we are honest about the fact that many people get into entrepreneurship because they want to make a bunch of money and that’s okay you don’t have you don’t have to pretend you don’t have to like lie about that part which is I think is is common unfortunately um but you also built bootstrap companies that enabled a great lifestyle for you and your employees and so I’m curious um can you explain for people who haven’t read richers King post what is the premise of this post and then how it’s played out for you I think the key thing that people really like out of it is this uh two box problem that I put near the end that was my final decision of why to sell smart bear which is let’s say there’s two boxes in front of you and let’s say if you are wealthy suppose try to remember when you weren’t in one box there’s $10 million like period that’s what’s in the box in the second box which is opaque there’s either $20 million or nothing and let’s just say it’s a 50-50 chance of which one it is and the question is which box do you want you have to pick just one which one do you want well if you don’t have money yet I mean almost everyone’s going to pick the 10 million for sure because it changes your life permanently now you could argue you know what kind of Lifestyle blah blah blah but like that’s a life-changing amount of money whereas the other one is even more money but it’s actually not that much more life-changing and there’s a good chance that you won’t get it at all that’s silly this is why when you get offered some money to sell the company it’s often a good idea to take it of course it could be big in the future but if you haven’t crossed over to this life-changing amount of money yet what I was in that post called the freedom line You could argue how free how much money okay but will you cross over some sort of line which maybe you should decide for yourself it’s it’s awfully hard not to take it now what’s interesting about the box game is if you’re a statistician or you’re an economist what you would say is there’s no difference between the two boxes because the expected value of both box is 10 million so they’re the same and my point is no they’re not expected value is not the right way to evaluate the situation furthermore in real life I said that one box was 50/50 in real life you don’t know what the probabilities are what’s the chance the company will grow and sell and be huge what’s the chance it’s stagnant and it doesn’t sell what’s the chance that it goes to zero like nobody knows so it’s worse than that it’s uncertainty meaning I don’t even know what the probabilities are are much less risky which means I do know what the probabilities are so it’s actually far worse so why know you know yeah some people might take the other box it’s okay you can do whatever you want obviously but most people will take that sure thing when it’s real money now if it’s $10 versus $20 you know whatever you might as well take a flyer on 20 because who cares so the magnitudes relative to your net worth also matter which I didn’t really talk about there in that post because I wasn’t getting into that but that’s also true that it is it changing something substantially for you or not is actually a critical question so you’re a great writer and there’s two or three great sentences that I like out of this post it was uh you very bluntly you say I was always in it for the money especially in the form of an acquisition I would tell everyone here we’re here to make money and if someone offers to buy the company someday I’m going to sell it and then you said after you sold it you go I have the freedom to work on any project I want for the rest of my life while simultaneously providing for my family never again worrying about bills debt having a place to sleep or sending my daughter to any college she wants and I particularly the I was in it for the money I think that’s just great to just be very clear and knowing exactly what you want uh in that post I thought that I thought that was beautiful how you said that also it’s not incompatible with things like I want our customers to be happy I want our employees to also make that much money blah blah blah like it’s not incompatible with other positive things that you want to do there’s a big difference between I want to make money and do ethical things and create products that actually have value and are not just uh middlemen or something like that or Arbitrage um you can say both in fact you probably should so you wrote that post in ’ 09 I think originally and you have this cool graph where you show like there’s like a threshold of that matters uh in 2023 24 what’s that threshold you think now and what do you think it was then well what’s interesting is um I it’s this is not relative so at this point at at at WP engine also we’ve had a few secondary rounds which by the way all employees got to participate uh in as well um and so now I have enough money that uh I don’t have a line anymore like it’s okay if I don’t make any more money ever again I really don’t care you know I don’t care like oh can I get a a jet or not it’s not interesting to me just this is personal right everyone’s different when it comes to money or what they want in lifestyle I have the lifestyle that I want I don’t need more money so there’s no line like I just don’t that that’s not what’s motivating or what will make a decision for me anymore well what about Jason Cohen and’ 06 when you sold like was there what was the number where you were like anything above is gravy and that’s that’s a threshold for me I think then I was thinking uh like 10 million um I think I think nowadays it’s it’s much more clear that you need something like 20 million this is all in the US by the way to have what would be considered to be like a rich lifestyle in America because okay you know people say things like um well I only spend you know 80 to 100K a year right now so if I had 10 million I I could live off of that and you’d be right but that’s not how people are I mean I’m not very materialistic and even I wouldn’t want to do that oh I’m going to continue to live at that rate forever isn’t usually what people want to do it could be again if that’s you then that’s that’s amaz that’s awesome perfect you know what to do that’s not really what happens so probably more like 20 million because you have to you have to there’s a lot of things to do but you have to think about um averages and having a portfolio that’s balanced and then taxes and then inflation and so even 4% of of Interest taking out per year is actually kind of a lot given that you want to maintain it and keep up with inflation Etc and that’s where the 20 million sometimes comes from is is H you know 4% of that is like a little under a m a million after tax and then you can have quite what you what anyone in America would consider a rich lifestyle I’m happy that you put a number on it one thing I think is cool we should put this chart up are the graph on on our YouTube channel so basically it’s like there’s like the levels he’s like you can’t afford to lose your job you know at some point you’re at that where losing your job would be detrimental to you okay then you can own your own house then you can and you wrot never look at the right side of a menu right so you only look at the dish you don’t look at the price uh never have to work again and then it’s like private jet and you can see that like it’s Asin totic the the the value of the cash is you know definitely flattening out the further you go and so you draw that line and the freedom line basically of like you never have to work again you could have total total control over your time as like the important threshold yeah but see so much also depends on things like I mean if you’re 26 and you get this offer um and you know you do want to work like you don’t want to not work again that’s not what you’re going to do you’re GNA do something so it’s like all right I don’t need to never work again quote unquote what I would like to but but let’s say you’re burned out it’s been six or seven years you just want to do something else and so well you know you do take a ton of money off the table then you can invest a couple million into your next venture while still keeping a couple million in the bank and so no you couldn’t live off that for the rest of your life but you don’t want to live off that for rest of your life you want enough to self fund something and do the next thing and so I mean you have to look at the goals of course that are in front of you um but certainly you don’t want to adopt other people’s goals I mean I think that’s maybe the unspoken other message of the post is what is it that you want and how do you know that and how do you get that and if someone else says like no you should you should build a unicorn like it doesn’t matter what anybody else says yeah play your game so uh you know your blog is basically like a a gold mine of startup with wisdom and I was mining it last night when I was doing my research for this going back through reading some of the stuff that I liked and there was a few things I had never read that I actually really really liked I wanted to read a couple of these get you to react to them because you had some uh like kind of just nuggets small small short things that I want you to elaborate a little bit on or maybe give an example about just to make it real for people um because they they rang true to me so here’s one you said all startups are screwed up including the ones that work it’s just that the ones that work have or two things that they’re excellent at even though they screwed up a bunch of things that didn’t uh it didn’t kill them they didn’t die um so explain this because I think people have a perception of my business is kind of screwed up that’s maybe why I’m failing the ones that work it’s all working it’s all good it’s you know that it’s something different right explain that one yeah it makes sense that that’s our perception number one because we all have like some form of imposter syndrome of like somehow everyone else has their [ ] figured out we don’t um which of course isn’t true but it makes sense that we all kind of feel that way um the other thing is we see every problem in our business and we only dwell on the problems like the things that are going well we’re not spending time on those things because that’s not what needs attention needs fixing so you know we’re spending 90% of our time on all the problems of which there are many so we feel like we’re just drowning in in bad things which we are that’s the truth then you look at a competitor or whatever somebody on Tech Crunch and what are you seeing some weird varnished outside not true version of it where they’re super confident everything’s fine blah blah blah the the way I like to say it is um whenever you see a company kind of like immediately go out of business go look at what they posted on their Blog the previous week and go look at the last podcast they did I promise you it was 100% optimism everything’s going well we’re growing like crazy we’re getting profitable we’re hiring people are loving I guarantee it’s all that the week before they went bankrupt that just proves that it’s [ ] now that doesn’t mean everyone’s failing or everyone’s not failing it just proves that what you’re seeing is definitely not the truth but you are seeing your truth and dwelling on the bat so this disparity makes sense but once you so so it’s logical once you know that you’re like okay so it’s not like every it’s not true that everyone’s public Persona is is the truth then the other thing you can do is read the more honest accounts of businesses like Twitter or you know Facebook all the stuff when they’re coming up and it’s just full of [ ] like it’s just R stuff all the but what do you see in those things not that you should be like Facebook I’m not saying that but just as an interesting Factor but what is it about them it’s like well here’s this thing there was something about connecting people at on colleges with the faces and the whatever that was just so correct so good well we might say now had such good product Market fit that despite all of the other problems it was a raging success uh at Twitter like this idea that you’re posting just the headline of your blog post why was that so perfect I don’t know maybe no one does people have theories it does doesn’t matter the point is it was so compelling that all those other problems just I mean there was a fail whell for years for years they couldn’t keep the site up something about it again I maybe I can’t put my finger on it but something about it was so compelling they they succeeded despite this obvious public massive year multi-year failures you know so that’s what I mean by like okay so everything screwed up okay different ways different levels screwed up sure but everything’s screwed up and if there’s those or two things that are just so compelling whether it’s delighting people or so useful or it’s built into their workflow there’s various reasons why something might be just so good and I have thoughts on that as well of course um then uh then it it you succeed despite those problems it doesn’t mean the problems are like okay and you shouldn’t attack them but it does mean a few things that are very useful one emotionally like get over it it’s okay everyone else screw up too two you’re not going to fix everything and you don’t have to because success stories besides like Facebook blah blah blah but even boot St solo companies that person also does not fix every problem they have of course how could they there’s just not enough hours in the day so you don’t have to fix every problem oo that’s a relief then it begs the question which couple of problems only should I be fixing right now that really are holding me back that really might lead me to go out of business that really is hindering my growth the most the most that’s really why people are canceling the most you know these These are example things that might be that critical problem or two identifying that by answering questions like those that’s what you should do and you should be seeking what that one or two you know critical things are that’s the reason people don’t cancel despite that crap the reason people sign up the fight the reason they advocate for you on Twitter review sites what are they saying in there that’s so freaking good because whatever that is you need every every customer to experience that thing like maybe you can change your processes or your s your features or the onboarding process whatever so that more people will experience that amazing thing whatever it is so identifying those one to three key things the one to three problems that’s what you’ve got to do then that’s where you focus your time whether you’re a solar preneur or whether you’re WP engine you have uh 1,200 people those are the few things you focus on on you know how do I remove some of those barriers that I actually should how do I enhance these things that are the thing that’s making it work and though all the rest of it you don’t want to ignore you want to do it you see it but you must just for capacity and actually it’s okay that you are and and again I gave you lots of examples of why it is okay in fact that you are so that’s what to do about that dude I remember I used to host these events and I would have I would get to we’d have all these speakers come and they were founders of every startup you’ve heard of and I would hang out with them in the green room with about six of them at a time and it was nothing but complaining and fear and I remember we had this guy named Alex Alex started this company called the athletic you guys know the athletic it’s like a um subscription sports blog or Media Company they and eventually sold to New York Times for hundreds of millions of dollars I was with him I think on a Friday and that Wednesday the Wednesday before they just released an article saying they had raised $100 million in funding everything was going great and they had this beautiful photo shoot and he was a ball of stress and I think he he was just kind of um venting a little bit to me of saying everything that was going wrong how he’s so frustrated with this and that and I remember thinking I’m like dude you’re in the New York Times like on Wednesday and you had this beautiful photo shoot sounds like everything was going great and he was just it was just the reality was that things were going mostly great obviously you turn out all right but he was just complaining so much to me because I was just kind of a sounding board for him and I remember like thinking after all of these events that I’ve hosted that was my major takeaway which is that the people I admire they were [ ] shows just like I was and that was like kind of a game-changing kind of mind altering belief that that happened doing those EV I gotta be careful I gotta be careful asking how’s it going you you never know what don’t ask yeah yeah yeah I was like how are you man and was like just bitching constantly and and and I also like I like EG I got to give these guys respect I was eging them on it’s not like they were just like bitching [ ] I was something does change with scale so um before product Market fit it’s obviously you don’t know what you’re doing yet that’s the whole point and then you do and you’re starting to scale up if you do um then it’s just all a [ __ ] show all of it because everything’s growing and weird and no one knows what to do and and the thing that got you to product Market are the wrong actions to take when you scale you’re like all I’m doing is experimenting not when you scale you know what to do now you need to do more of it you need specialists in it you so it’s a totally different Behavior it becomes more like a like a tumultuous ocean kind of thing where it’s like some things are riding high and fine and and some things are not but it’s not true that like a 100% of the things are broken it’s just not true anymore because we’ve had the time and the people blah blah blah to build up to that and you need to like as you scale up you need it needs to not be a food fight forever like it has to mature into something because you can’t you can’t operate like you were just saying with a thousand people that’s just complete chaos so that’s that it can’t be you had a good quote from the guy from box Aaron Levy he he said um he goes starting up is the act of doing as many jobs as possible to make sure your company doesn’t die and then scaling up is the act of shedding as many jobs as possible to make sure that your company doesn’t die to make sure it survives right I think that’s uh very true you know another thing that Aaron Livy specifically said is uh um at any given time half of the company isn’t working I just don’t know which half right dude Aaron Levy doesn’t get nearly enough uh clout I think uh as he should so for those listening Aaron Levy started box it’s box.com he started box which is uh it’s like very similar to Dropbox but Enterprise he started that company when he was like 18 or was it 18 was he that young like he was just out of high school I think and he’s and it’s now a publicly traded company and he’s still the CEO he’s been doing this now for 15 plus years maybe that guy does not get nearly enough credit that guy’s the man we should have that guy on yeah Erin you’re welcome on uh I have a few few other spicy takes I want to get your get your reaction to because I was like reading this I was like oh I’ve been guilty of that because a lot of your advice even though WP is this huge company and you could talk about like scaling this big thing a lot of the stuff that resonated with me was the early stuff like the I don’t have product Market fit just pulling me yet um you said one thing you know most Founders who are doing customer Discovery or like that early stage research about an idea you go it’s just a Founder who’s in love with their idea essentially doing like fake sales calls like just looking for evidence to support their belief um I’ve definitely done that I’m sure Sam we all have that’s why it Ring’s true because of course we all have done that yeah and you asked like the stupidest question ever which is like does this interest you would would you buy this you know what I mean useless question yeah yeah you’re into this aren’t you yeah you just ask these like leading dumb questions you have another one I think is pretty good you go sell more value not more time customers don’t value their time they do crazy things to save $2 don’t sell them time because they don’t even value it um sell them more more value yeah that’s especially true in consumer consumers really don’t value their time um but even in business it’s true and so like a classic example is uh if you you you could have a product let’s say that um makes it less expensive to get marketing leads and so you could say this Hales your cost because it does but what are you they going to do with the money they might just save it it’s possible what they could do is buy more leads so it also could you could say the same thing is double your leads so that’s the same thing half your costs or double your leads same product but how much will I pay for having the cost I will pay some percentage of the cost that I saved 25% that’s actually kind of high usually people won’t pay quite that much they should they should pay pay up to 80% you know cuz why not but that’s not really how people think about it um so you could you could maybe uh charge 25% of the cost you save but if you say double the leads what will they pay what were they paying now for leads a lot what will they pay to double the leads the same amount they’ll pay 100% more to double the leads because they are already willing to pay that for leads they’re as demonstrated by they’re doing it right now so it’s a difference between 25% of one half of their spend which is an eighth or 100% of their spend same product so it’s just now now yes that’s idealized and so forth but it just goes to show saving money saving time it’s not a bad proposition but often the same product can be shown to generate value instead of Saving Time and all of a sudden it’s literally in order of magnitude more valuable now you could take all of that in price but as a a quote that I took from Michael mausen who’s amazing um in finance but startup folks haven’t heard of him um he has this great thing about this which is the thing to do I’m paraphrasing but the thing to do is to generate customer as much value as you can for the customer and then decide how to split it with them so you could split it with them by charging more you could split it with them by higher retention they just love you and they stay they’re getting so much value or getting new customers or advocacy they love you so much they talk like these are all ways you get value harder to measure than price I grant you that but they’re they’re very real it’s very real andur are their healthier business and the risk and the growth like very real and all those things so um of course that’s a that’s a something of a subjective statement I I get that but nevertheless it’s it’s really useful to think first generate a lot of value then think now how do I split that with the customer whether that’s some price some not and if so what how even if it is price how am I positioning that with them as in more value versus less you know saving money or less cost or less time something like that the only way that this story not ends but uh the exit you guys have to take this public right there’s a there’s a variety of things you can do when you’re our siiz one is going public one is that uh another PE firm another one is getting purchased by a sufficiently large company either directly or due to another uh um investment which again could either be a private thing like PE or they could be on the they might be on the public markets and and therefore have a stock sale or something like that you would you wouldn’t want that though right so the the way I think uh you should build a good company is you want optionality the ability to sell and at good terms but not not have to the ability to raise more money at good terms but not have to right the ability to go public but not have to like optionality is power so how do you do that you build a good company in the usual ways a company that’s growing and is profitable and the employees are happy as evidence as by they stay and customers are happy as evidence by they stay you know like these very obvious things of like what’s a good company you do that and that maximizes your options because you have because it’s good therefore you drive that’s what I’ve said all along and still believe this very day that’s the right thing for us to do is that can I ask you one quick question as we wrap up we talked about um TKO Sean and I both love them but this was the we were talking about stocks he picked the company that owns UFC and WWE uh TKO is uh I don’t know majority minority owned or you know one of the brainchild behind TKO is uh Silver Lake partners and their CEO I think his name is uh aan Durban is that how you say his name um I was looking him up the other day real fascinating guy does he sit on your board is that right did I see that no the no no there’s there’s um we have several people from Silver Lake on the board um really impressive interesting people who have really helped the company yeah what are those guys like on the finance side um it’s just this level above what You’ ever see otherwise right because in finance you either go to Wall Street to make a lot of money or or you could do PE but like this is the cream of the crop like they have you know the you know um valid Victorian from Warden doing like spreadsheets right so and that and then it goes up from there so it’s just like this amazing analysis and insight to things plus of course they see a lot of different companies so they can bring a lot of like this is happening to a lot of our companies now that sort of thing another thing I will say that’s special is you think PE and you think okay well they just take the companies apart and don’t care and of course there are those kinds of PE that that absolutely exist that reputation is earned with Silver Lake though that’s not the case that’s not the reputation they have so when you have a a an investor who on the one hand sure they can they can do all the Cutthroat stuff um they’re capable of all of it but also they have that sort of a view on what is product what a success how do you build value that’s incredible so so solake has been really amazing but obviously it it there two things one is a lot of firms aren’t like that the other thing is it depends on the person if a different set of people on the board we have a different experience and that’s true of all investors everywhere so uh a lot of times people are like should I should I raise money from X where X is some Venture firm and the answer is always who at X because the firm is is there is something because there’s a culture and there’s an attitude it’s not nothing it’s not nothing but the number one thing is who at the firm that’s what makes all the difference and unfortunately that can change well we appreciate you doing this man Jason Cohen a smart bear on Twitter a smart bear uh on a smartbear.com your blog it’s the best man you’re the man we appreciate this this is fun that’s the pod