Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Steph Smith (guest, a16z podcast host)
Introduction and Welcoming Steph Smith [00:00:00]
Shaan: All right, we’re here. Steph Smith’s here — one of the all-time favorite guests. This is, I think, appearance number six. So if you love this one, go listen to the other five. Steph’s great because she brings a dossier. I can’t even call it a document — it should be on google-dossier.com — because it is a 15-page document of trends, ideas, observations that might become something. Which makes you essentially the perfect MFM guest. And you’re also cool and fun to hang out with, so thank you for coming back.
Steph: Good to be here. Every time I come on I get way more nervous than any other appearance because you guys hype it up like that.
Shaan: Sam, do you know how I met Steph?
Sam: No, tell me the story.
Shaan: I will forever take credit for Steph Smith’s career. It has nothing to do with — no matter what I do, no matter how hard she works, no matter how smart she is — it’s all me. So basically she had this blog. Is it still Steph Smith dot IO?
Steph: Yeah.
Shaan: It was a really good blog, and she had this headline. The headline was “to be great, just be good consistently.” Is that it?
Steph: Basically. What was it exactly? It’s like “how to be great — just be good repeatedly.”
Shaan: Yes. And I was like, I DM’d her, I was like, “Steph, this is the best headline I’ve ever read.” And I was like, “Look, we’re launching this thing called Trends. Do you want to join us?” She was like, “Ah, maybe.” I was like, “Come work for us for a couple years, and I have a feeling you’re going to leave after — and that’s totally cool. Come do a tour of duty.” Now it’s been about a year and a half for me — a year since she’s left. She’s at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the biggest VC firms in the world.
Shaan: How is that going?
Steph: It’s going great. We just hired a producer, which is nice because for a while I was kind of hacking it together myself. But yeah, the podcast finally feels like it’s taking off. We’re trying a bunch of different formats. I feel like I’m finally easing into it, finally having fun. When I listen to My First Million, you can tell you guys talk about it like it’s the best job in the world. I’m finally easing into that, which is nice.
Sam: What’s it like working there? When I think about working at a16z, I think of the TV show Billions — like it’s just fun all the time. But is it just normal company stuff? Is it more normal than I’d imagine, or is it as spectacular as I think?
Steph: It’s kind of both. Day to day it’s totally normal because you’re just doing your job. Do you go into an office?
Sam: Are you remote?
Steph: I’m remote. They do have offices. I go in every so often, just because I started working remotely about a year into my career, so for the last eight years or so I’ve never had an office. It’s like a novelty for me. Everyone else is sick of the office and I’m like, “Oh, candy bars. You just sit here all day.”
Shaan: You’re like, “Oh, you can’t leave this box. I know, it’s crazy. I’m like, how special.”
Sam: I think the way I talk about when Sarah worked at Facebook — when you work at a place you just sort of get used to everything and optimize for convenience. Like, “Oh, there’s an all-hands meeting. I can either go down to the cafeteria or stream it from my desk. I’ll just stream it.” And I was like, “No, you need to go sit front row with a pen and pad. When he says any questions, you need to jump out of your chair and ask one every single week until he invites you over for dinner.” That was basically my master plan until you’re his best friend.
Shaan: I kind of think you should be doing the same thing. Like, what’s the point of working at Andreessen Horowitz unless you’re at the office every day just waiting for some awesome Mark Andreessen moment? Just like you’re there when he yells at somebody. Or like — you know they’re doing the weird stuff — and you’re like, “Yes, this is the weirdness I came here for.”
The Value of Being Present at Great Companies [00:06:00]
Sam: It’s like every movie where there’s the big boss at the conference table and the manager says, “Who thought to do this? The number could be blank,” and you say, “Actually, sir, it’s six four seven three.” And he says, “What did you say? Come with me.”
Shaan: Yeah. It’s like for six weeks I’ve been leaving crumbs in the kitchen to see if anybody would clean it up, and finally somebody did. Pull up the security footage. It was Steph Smith. You’re promoted. You’re at the top now. But you’ve got to be there. I can’t believe you’re not there every day. That’s the real upside of your job — not your salary. It’s that you can go hang out with some of the smartest people in the world. But you’ve got to do the hanging-out part.
Steph: You’re right. I’ve got to hover. I’ve got to be around the office, like how you lurk on the internet.
Shaan: Think about this: if you told 21-year-old you that you were in this position, would you stay home and just do your own thing? Or would you go in and lurk and be serendipitous? The 21-year-old you would definitely be like, “I’m going in, I’m meeting these people.”
Sam: It’s easy to get casual about it later.
Steph: I’ve got to embrace it. I feel like if you were in the office, Sam, you’d go up to someone grabbing a snack and be like, “Hey, what’s up?” And I’m so awkward about it.
Shaan: You need to be like a romantic comedy — bumping into everybody and dropping all your papers and then cleaning them up together. Not even for the romance, just to create a little intersection between you and these people.
Shaan: When I was at Twitch after we got acquired, I literally told people openly: “I’m not here to do my job. I’m going to find whatever the most interesting things are happening here and just be in those meetings.” And it works. That’s how I became friends with Emmett. I was like, “This is the most interesting guy in the building.” Anytime someone said, “You need to go talk to Jerry on the fourth floor” — no, I’m going to stay in Emmett’s meeting. Everybody gets up and leaves, and I’m still there on my laptop. Next group walks in and I’m still there. Nobody’s going to say anything.
Shaan: I remember when Ninja got poached — the top streamer on Twitch got poached — and there were secret meetings about what to do, whether to counter-offer. I wasn’t in those. So I just wrote up a plan and sent it to the three top executives. “Here’s the plan for Ninja. I know I’m not even on the team.” Then they were like, “Attend this meeting tonight at 8pm.” And I was in. I got into the cool stuff by basically not doing my job. That’s my recommendation: if you’re going to be around these people, that’s the real upside. Don’t do your actual job. Do the job of hanging out.
Sam: Speaking of that — do you think the talent at a16z is actually significantly smarter than at any other decent tech company?
Steph: I would say yes. I mean, I haven’t worked at that many companies, but this job — at my last jobs it was a lot of checkers, and now I’m playing chess.
Sam: What do those guys know about newsletters, right?
Shaan: Well, you have something — you were like, “Oh, I get nervous for this more than anything else.” Are you nervous in those a16z meetings? Like, these are people you used to follow on Twitter?
Steph: Yeah, definitely. The podcast is kind of an asset to the firm, and I’m like — they hired a 29-year-old who candidly feels a little out of place among people who have been doing this forever. Like, Mark Andreessen basically invented the first widely-used browser. So I do feel sometimes a little out of place. But I’m a year in and I’m getting used to it.
Sam: I think you should give yourself more credit. You’re cooler than everybody I’ve met at a16z.
Steph: I’m going to bring in one of those Nick Gray name tags that says “cooler than you — Shaan thinks so.”
Shaan: This is exactly why I knew she was a good hire. I was like, “She doesn’t realize how good she is.” This is a deal I got. She doesn’t know yet.
Idea #1: Repurposing Underutilized Commercial Real Estate [00:14:00]
Shaan: Okay, Steph — where do you want to go from here?
Steph: Let’s start with the first idea. I think this one is really interesting because right now a lot of people know there’s this issue with commercial real estate. All these office buildings are up for sale or at least people are leaving. Highest level of vacancy ever, especially in cities like San Francisco where I think there’s like 35% vacancy — and going up as soon as people can get out of their leases.
Steph: A lot of people think: okay, let’s swap that commercial real estate for homes and apartments. That makes sense. But I think there’s this huge opportunity for fractional real estate. Click on one of those links on the dossier and tell me what you see.
Sam: It looks like a yoga class of some kind. Dimly lit, candles. Looks like a hot yoga class. But then on the roof there’s this crazy visual — looks like you’re in a forest. The whole thing just looks super cool.
Steph: Where do you think this is? What is this building?
Sam: I have no idea. It almost looks like the lobby of an office building — it’s huge — but they make it look like a temple.
Steph: Yeah, so this is a club at night. Friday and Saturday, maybe Sunday, from like 7pm to 2am. And then throughout the week it’s not used at all. So I went to this thing called Temple Immersive in San Francisco and I talked to the woman who ran it — they had just opened. I asked, “How’d you find this space?” And she said, “The club reached out to us.” Like, the club just has all this real estate going unused.
Steph: So I was thinking: someone could do this anywhere. In any city, go contact a bunch of clubs, link them up with yoga studios, Pilates studios. And then I was also thinking — what else could this real estate be used for? Another trend that’s been taking off is rage rooms.
Sam: What’s a rage room?
Steph: You just smash stuff. There’s one in SF as well. They give you plates, old electronics, whatever — and you just get a session in this empty room and you smash stuff. Which you just don’t get to do in normal life. So I was thinking — not just yoga studios, but go convert a club during the week into a rage room.
Shaan: We have a member of Hampton who’s been tweeting about rage rooms. His name’s Raleigh Williams. He created a version of an escape room — and he sold it for about 26 million dollars.
Sam: What did he do?
Shaan: He was at a law firm, didn’t love his job, read an article about how lucrative escape rooms were — this was back in 2015 when escape rooms were the new trend. He looks it up, figures out how much money these make, and goes, “I think this is a good business.” But he doesn’t have enough money to build it out. So in true entrepreneurial spirit, he doesn’t let the lack of resources stop him. He asks: “Can I build an escape room inside an abandoned bus?” He buys a 1984 Bluebird bus, converts the inside into an escape room, and now he’s got an escape room on wheels. He could drive it up to company offices and do corporate off-sites right there.
Shaan: The bus itself was making maybe five to ten grand a month in free cash flow. So he starts opening up real locations. Opens five, six more. Then he starts adding to the back of the real estate — trampoline parks, axe throwing. Basically just out-of-home entertainment. He bundles these together, and from around 2015 to 2020 he builds this up and then sells. He made 26 million dollars — a combination of the sale plus distributions along the way. He had spent about 10 million building them out and there were about 20 million in distributions. Crazy outcome.
Sam: I didn’t think these would be good businesses, and then I met him and started learning about it. He’s a nice dude too. People should go follow him on Twitter.
Shaan: How do you know him?
Sam: Just through Twitter. I’ve been going back and forth with him. He listens to the pod and reached out at some point.
Idea #2: Pay Transparency and the Salary Data Opportunity [00:22:00]
Shaan: Steph, talk about the pay transparency thing. This interests me a lot.
Steph: In the last couple of years there’s been a bunch of laws that have changed across states. Colorado is maybe the most well-known — companies have to, depending on the state, disclose certain aspects of a job related to pay. It might be a range that a specific role requires. Also, even if you’re already in a job, you can request your band and know how you compare to others across the company. It’s still very much in flux — at least a dozen states now require you to share those pay ranges — but this is changing.
Steph: So there’s this girl, Hannah Williams. She’s 26, super young, quit her job — she was making around $115,000 a year — and in the last year has just been doing the “man on the street” thing. All she does is goes up to people and asks: “Hey, what do you do? How much do you make?” Her social accounts have blown up. She has over a million followers on TikTok, 450,000 on Instagram, all in a year. An article written about her in January said she’d already made $600,000 since her switch.
Shaan: And here’s how she’s making money. The top link on her profile is an Indeed affiliate link — “get a job as a nurse.” Then she has a market research guide — learn how much you should be making. That collects emails. Then she’s partnered with Capital One to do local seminars at their banks, because some of their banks have cafes. And I believe she has a subscription database where you can see individual salary data with contextual information.
Sam: This is how you do it. This is awesome.
Shaan: We’ve talked about Levels.fyi on the pod before — similar concept. Crowdsourcing salary info so if you’re an engineer at Facebook you can find out: am I getting paid what other L4 engineers get? Should I be at Google instead? When we mentioned this on the pod, someone did this for doctors and nurses. They were med students, went and created a database for doctors, and I think they got acquired by Levels after hearing it on the pod and taking action.
Sam: I call these regulatory inflections. Anytime there’s a law change, multiple things open up. There’s tech inflections — Uber exists because everyone now has an iPhone with GPS. There’s cultural inflections — teens feel comfortable filming themselves. And there’s regulatory inflections — this drug is now legal, this patent is about to expire, or you now in Colorado have to disclose your salary band. Opens up new opportunities.
Idea #3: Direct-to-Consumer Hearing Aids [00:28:00]
Steph: You guys have talked about hearing aids on the pod before. As of October, the FDA relaxed their rules — hearing aids can now be sold over the counter.
Sam: That’s insane that they weren’t before. It’s been bothering me so much. And glucose monitors — I’m amazed those aren’t sold over the counter. I’ve been trying to get a hearing aid and they make me go to all these appointments.
Steph: Here’s another fun fact around hearing aids that I think is interrelated: 99% of custom hearing aids are already 3D printed. There are a few companies that basically own this market. The reason I love this is because 3D printing is the epitome of the hype cycle. Started in the 80s, got way over-hyped, people thought it was dead — but it’s come back in these really niche places like hearing aids. We talked to people at Trends a while ago who were using 3D printing for dental implants. It’s something that’s overlooked because people wrote it off.
Shaan: One of my best friends from college is a surgeon — ENT, ear nose throat. He’s been in school forever. I was like, “How’s it going?” He goes, “Oh it’s fine, but I’m having the most fun because now I run Duke’s 3D printing facility.” I was like, “3D printing? Like, you’re making toys?” He goes, “No, medical 3D printing.” I was like, “Wait, I thought 3D printing was not even a real thing for normal stuff — you guys are already using it in medicine?” He’s like, “Dude, I surgically implanted part of a skull that I 3D printed the other day. We take your jaw shape and create the exact shape needed for the implant.”
Shaan: I had no idea. It’s interesting — some technologies take forever to get into medicine because it’s such high stakes. For others, medicine is the only justification for putting in the time and money to get the technology to work. That’s where 3D printing has gone. It started as a hobbyist thing but the real commercialization has happened on the medical side.
Shaan: I think the same thing is happening with VR. People have tried the hobby thing for a long time, but the better commercial use cases are doctor training, pilot training — anything where you need to visualize and plan something. It’s worth developing a really high-quality VR simulation because it’s cheaper than doing a real prototype.
Sam: I met these guys who were doing seven million a month in sales on their hearing aid brand that I had never heard of. I was like, “Oh, DTC hearing aids — I think that’s actually going to be a big deal.” Were they bootstrapped?
Shaan: I don’t know if they’re fully bootstrapped, but they weren’t VC-backed. It was like their uncle gave them some money to scale.
Sam: And they were profitable.
Shaan: Are they Mormon? Oh my God.
Sam: How far away from the coast did they live?
Shaan: Inland.
Disclaimer: Hampton Franchise Caveat [00:36:00]
Shaan: I’ve got to come clean. I have a very late disclaimer. A few episodes ago we talked about a business idea — a children’s play space, basically. You go there, pay a membership fee, play with all these cool toys. I was like, “Oh, interesting business, it’s a franchise thing.” A business partner of mine went there and was telling me about it. He said, “I talked to the guy, here’s their occupancy, here’s what they’d be making.”
Shaan: Well, I went and looked at the website before and after, and basically meetings — bookings to inquire about a franchise — got booked out for four and a half months after the pod. And I just want to say: I have no idea if this is a good business or not. That was a single-experience estimate. “Hey, that’s kind of cool, could make money.” I do not endorse this. I can’t say either way. I really hope a bunch of people didn’t go buy franchises of this thing thinking I was vouching for it. I just had to say that because I saw all those meetings get booked and I got a little nervous. Please don’t mortgage the house and go buy a franchise of this thing.
Sam: Did they reach out to you?
Shaan: No. I don’t think they even knew what happened. The MFM effect.
Shoutout: Adam Bornstein’s New Book [00:38:00]
Sam: We have these sources — guys who will text when we’re about to talk about something health-related or franchise-related or whatever, and they’ll give us some insight. One of those guys is Adam Bornstein. I met Adam because he basically ran a lot of Tim Ferriss’s stuff. He had this conference called 212, invited me to go. They rented out the Four Seasons, and I checked into my room and it was so big I called down to the front desk. I was like, “Who do I share this room with?” It was a 4,000 square foot presidential suite with a 16-person dining table and a movie theater. That’s how I met Adam.
Sam: He just had a book come out. It’s called You Can’t Screw This Up. It’s basically Ryan Holiday, James Clear, Tim Ferriss style — simple, practical habits for creating a healthier diet. He also worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who wrote the foreword. Just want to give a shout to Adam. He’s a friend of the pod.
Jobs of the Future [00:41:00]
Shaan: Let’s do “jobs of the future.” I also love that you’ve branded this Steph’s List.
Steph: Thanks. This comes from two things. One, people think AI is taking all of our jobs. I personally don’t fully agree with that. Two, on this pod you’ve talked about different jobs that don’t quite exist yet or are just starting to exist.
Steph: Start with this stat: between 1940 and today, 85% of employment growth came from jobs that did not exist in 1940.
Sam: Did they not exist because of new businesses? The job title didn’t exist?
Steph: Yep. Before 2008 or 2009, the idea of a social media manager did not exist. The idea of a UX designer did not exist. Those are jobs that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people now do. There are going to be versions of this going forward. I think it’s a little more brain-racking to figure out in the age of AI because you have to ask, “Is this going to disappear in three years instead of 30?” But there are frameworks to think about it.
Steph: For example, I think drones are hitting that stage — similar to what we talked about with 3D printing — where a lot of consumers own them but a lot of companies are starting to use them too. Within that industry you could have drone technicians. People are going to need to fix those drones. Is there drone traffic control? There’s already aircraft traffic control, so why wouldn’t there be drone traffic control?
Shaan: Safety inspector, charging installation.
Sam: Let’s start with ones you’ve talked about before. You mentioned the chief automation officer — what does that job do and why did you think it was a job of the future?
Steph: A lot of companies have a CTO, but the CTO is so wrapped up in infrastructure, cybersecurity, keeping the company’s data safe. What they often aren’t focused on — and maybe some people would argue this is the CEO’s role — is how do I actually take the technology that exists today, like AI, and enable every single person within my company to understand how to up-level their jobs? To become 3x more productive? Most people either aren’t plugged into the technology, don’t have the excitement to implement it, or it’s just “you don’t know what you don’t know.”
Sam: Steph, can I give you a compliment? I remember that pod. We talked about it at Hampton, and the very first hire we made was an automation expert. His name’s Grant. All he does is automate stuff — basically a Zapier plus Airtable expert. Because one of our values early on was: we want to grow big but not have to hire loads of people. Let’s start automating right away. And it was because of that conversation. The very first hire we made was an automation expert.
Shaan: That’s awesome. The bottleneck is not typically that you have to create new things. You’re basically bridging a gap — duct-taping a ton of processes that are tedious, manual, repetitive, or low-value but need to be done. And then there are tools that could do that if you knew they existed and knew how to pipe them together.
Shaan: I do this at our company almost by accident. Like, I found someone who just had to spend hours a week manually square-cropping photos for Shopify. I was like, “You do this for how many pictures?” And they were like, “Yeah, it sucks.” I was like, “There’s a tool that will bulk upload and do that automatically, then pipe it to Slack so you can skim through and just fix the one that’s off. 98% will be done automatically.” And they were like, “Oh, thank you. That saves me so much time.”
Shaan: How many of those are there in every company? A ton. And the problem is, even if you hypothetically only have 10 people — even being at 10 people for three years has created enough habit that even getting an automation person in now, it’s like, “Oh man, where do I start?” Doing this with 10,000 people is an impossible task.
Sam: There should be a ratio: for every 10 employees, you have someone who knows how to automate. Pair them with teams, and they just shadow people for a day. I bet anyone who tries to automate what they can would pick up so many things — “Why are you doing that at all?”
Steph: I think you should also have this for team collaboration. Have you guys ever read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team?
Sam: Yeah, by Patrick Lencioni.
Shaan: It’s a great book. Written as a fictional story, which is unusual for a business book. It’s like a narrative — there’s a company, they go to a team off-site, and they have these different personalities and show the ways a team can be dysfunctional.
Steph: The takeaway — and the reason the book is called that — is that successful teams all look different, but every dysfunctional company is the same. Here are the five things they all have in common.
Shaan: The way the book’s written is cool. It’s like, here’s a situation: two people both have valid perspectives, or one person doesn’t realize that what they’re saying is causing the other people to feel a certain way, causing all these second-order effects. Good book for management.
Steph: My real takeaway is: I’ve been in a bunch of companies where stuff builds up and then they’re like, “We need an executive coach, we need a team off-site, we need to break down all this scar tissue.” I actually think companies should embed this in the company from the start. There should be somebody that floats around — basically the “Wendy Rhoades” from Billions, the team psychologist. But instead of one-on-one therapy, it’s somebody who sits in meetings and takes notes. Every week they deliver: “Sam, do you know that you do this? That’s making these people feel this way. When they walk out of the room, they’re not going to do the thing you want in the way you want because of how you said it.”
Shaan: Like somebody that identifies dysfunction. For every 10 people you hire, if you can make that team 10% more efficient, you’ve basically created one extra employee without the payroll. The ROI would be there. So I think “collaboration expert” is a kind of job of the future — an internal compass to figure out where the team is breaking down.
Sam: What are the other ones on your list? Head of Remote and Cyber Actuary?
Steph: Head of Remote — there’s so much dysfunction at companies that transitioned from non-remote to remote. They just copy-pasted a bunch of things from the office and don’t actually know how to build a remote organization from the ground up. How to do things asynchronously. It’s like a massive macro shift for thousands of people and there’s no expertise guiding it.
Steph: Some companies already have this: a Remote Work Officer. What would they do? It’s kind of like IT, but for remote work. They make sure everybody has a good home setup — Sam, you’ve talked about this — we need to not look terrible on camera, whether internally or with clients. So how do we make sure everybody has a good Zoom setup? Best practices around remote working. How to set boundaries for different time zones. How to plan meetings.
Sam: Isn’t this wild? The same companies that had these strict clothing rules — you have to show up in a suit, you have to look a certain way — are letting people sit with their MacBook under their chin with a dirty background trying to win a client. Where’s your digital suit?
Steph: Do you guys do that at a16z? Because when I imagine a16z, I imagine that’s a khaki-pants type of place.
Shaan: I think Lululemon ABC pants is the official pants of men there.
Steph: One thing a16z does do — their design team creates beautiful Zoom backgrounds every quarter that the whole company uses. They actually look good, not just the company logo awkwardly photoshopped in the corner. And they refresh them every quarter. So there’s at least visual consistency.
Sam: I love that. Invest in cool Zoom backgrounds. Their management fees have to go somewhere.
Shaan: To summarize on Head of Remote — think about macro tech trends: remote work, AI, automation, cybersecurity. The idea of a Chief Security Officer didn’t exist 10 years ago, and then it just became so important for tech firms. It’s the same with all of these.
Cyber Actuary, Eden Data, and Personal Security [00:59:00]
Steph: And then “Cyber Actuary” — a lot of people are worried there’s going to be a lot more cybercrime. People replicating your voice, getting your bank details. Actuaries assess risk for anything. How risky is it to deploy this celebrity’s voice in this way? How risky is it to open-source a new LLM? There are going to be all these implications of things becoming a lot more digital. There’s already a ton of actuaries figuring out how much insurance should cost in the physical world. I think there’s just this huge white space around risk that people haven’t calculated yet.
Sam: Did I tell you guys about Eden Data? I met the founder through Hampton — his name’s Taylor — and he told me he created the company because of an article one of us wrote on Trends. I don’t know if that’s true, but he launched this thing called Eden Data. In just two years it’s doing like six or seven million dollars in revenue.
Sam: What they do: if you’re a smallish startup — 50 to 100 people — you need a certain type of compliance to sell software to enterprise companies. There’s basically a 50 to 100-point checklist of everything you need to do. A lot of these startups can’t afford a full-time Chief Security Officer, so instead they pay Eden Data seven, eight, ten thousand dollars a month. He’s got a team of outsourced people who go through your website and the entire checklist, make sure all 50 or 100 things are done, and they have templates to do it. Then they stay on and monitor for any changes. So when you go pitch an enterprise company, even as a small startup, you’ve already done all the compliance work. He’s going to do about eight million in revenue this year. Subscription consultancy. Killing it.
Shaan: Crazy. When I see companies like this, I think — I actually wanted to do something similar for rich people. A personal security audit: your house security, bank accounts, crypto security, just poke holes in everything. At a certain net worth it definitely makes sense. You’re not the expert, and you have way more to lose than the cost of the service.
Shaan: I reached out to tons of people doing this, and the problem is they’re all kind of mom and pop. A lot of them are ex-military guys. Like, I was talking to one of them and it was very manual — “this person’s gonna do this” — no easy onboarding. There’s no Plaid-equivalent where you just log in and it gets done. I do think this is a fragmented service waiting for one great company to consolidate it.
Idea #4: Mouth Tape and Nasal Breathing [01:06:00]
Steph: Okay — mouth tape.
Sam: I first heard about this like six months ago. Some guy on Twitter was like, “I taped my mouth shut every night for the last six months, best thing I’ve ever done.”
Steph: We have this guy who has a company called Hostage Tape. It’s just tape for your mouth. He told me he was going to launch it and I was like, “This is dumb.” Six months later he’s at $500,000 in sales. I’m like, great. A year later, $2 million in sales. And he’s just rubbing it in my face.
Sam: I don’t think he’s an official sponsor, but Andrew Huberman has been talking about it. In my household we like to call him “Father Drew” as a joke. But if Father Drew promotes something — he’s like Bro Science Oprah — if he says it’s good, you’re going to get a huge spike.
Steph: Yeah. I don’t know where this goes exactly, beyond going and selling some mouth tape and maybe rebranding it. But that’s the trend. This guy’s company is called Hostage Tape.
Sam: I saw it and I was like, “This is the worst thing ever. This is awful.” But he crushed it. Kudos to him.
Shaan: Do you guys even understand what’s good about mouth tape? What it does?
Steph: It makes you breathe through your nose. And breathing through your nose is better for you than breathing through your mouth.
Idea #5: Lupini Beans [01:10:00]
Sam: I just — I’ve been going into every American grocery store looking for these. The high-protein bean.
Shaan: You’ve been talking about this to me forever. You keep telling me about this bean.
Sam: Dude, it’s got two times more protein than chickpeas, two times more fiber than edamame, 80% fewer calories than almonds, 60% fewer carbs than pistachios — 35 grams per serving. Obviously they cherry-picked the comparisons, but these beans — I think they’re originally from Italy, popular there — I have just seen this over and over. Edamame wasn’t popular in North America 20-30 years ago. Nobody knew what it was. It came from Asia, and now you go to restaurants and it’s everywhere.
Shaan: How would you like to invest in The Next Step, Sam?
Sam: Do you remember Bobby at HustleCon? He’d go around pitching people as a joke. Was it hot dog water? It was tuna water, dude.
Shaan: Have you guys had chickpea pasta?
Sam: Of course. I don’t like it. It makes you fart like crazy.
Shaan: The Lupini pitch: “70 more gas.” That’s the thing.
Sam: Okay, you’ve been calling this for a while. It seems like a good DTC product idea. There’s like one company doing it.
Steph: Yeah, Brami — they also do chickpea pasta, I think. But I just think maybe there’s something in the supply chain or how hard it is to procure this stuff. To me they’re pretty cheap and they taste really good. You can eat them plain, or this company does flavored versions — rosemary garlic, things like that.
Sam: Does it give you gas?
Steph: I don’t think so. I didn’t do an A/B test.
Shaan: You can admit it. This is a safe space.
Sam: Okay, I’m going to try these out and see how I feel about it. By the way, this is the type of product that when we mention it on MFM, 13 people are going to start it for six weeks and then nobody is doing it six months later.
Shaan: And the same people that tell us they’re coming back in eight weeks to report back — yeah. If my DM history has four different pitches from the same person, it’s probably a no forever.
Sam: “This is a no forever.”
Idea #6: Premium Advent Calendars [01:17:00]
Sam: Can we do one more? The Advent calendars? Because I feel like someone in the community is going to jump on this.
Shaan: Do you even know what Advent is? Is this some Catholic thing?
Sam: Oh yeah, this is very Catholic. Advent is in December. We Catholics — are you Catholic, Steph?
Steph: No.
Sam: Heathens. It’s okay. We have Lent, which is 40 days — that’s when Jesus walked around in the desert and you’re not supposed to eat meat. And then we have Advent, which is the 30 days leading up to Christmas. There’s traditionally an Advent calendar that tells the story of what Mary and Joseph did — with the donkey, getting all the gifts, all of that. Each day you open the calendar, and for kids there’s a piece of chocolate inside.
Shaan: I thought an Advent calendar was those little peel-back calendars.
Sam: Yeah! That’s what an Advent calendar is. You peel it back each day and there’s chocolate inside. You’ve been walking around with that understanding your whole life and you were right.
Steph: So this comes from a guy — Namazaki Paul. He doesn’t sound Catholic. And this doesn’t really have to do with religion. The thing is, Advent calendars happen around the holidays, and people are scrambling to figure out last-minute gifts that are thoughtful but fun. A lot of people get Advent calendars but they get these shitty versions — like expired milk chocolate from the year before.
Steph: What Paul did is he created this sake calendar. Every day for the month of December you open your little — well, not little, it’s like the size of a printer — Advent calendar, and you get this special sake that he’s hand-picked from Japan. He sells them for $300 each, caps it at 500 per year, and he sells out. Do the math — that’s $150,000 just from that one drop. And he doesn’t even get much traffic. His site gets about 2,000 visits per month.
Steph: That just got me thinking: especially since we’re about six months ahead of Christmas — what Advent calendars is the My First Million community going to make that are way cooler than the expired milk chocolate? I’ve seen hot sauce calendars, Lego calendars. But it’s got to be something someone can open for either 12 days or all of December.
Sam: This is really cute and cool. And you have this photo of a girl with a binder full of condiment packets. I see your vision and I think it’s awesome.
Steph: That tweet — you’re talking about Nicole. It just says “organized my sauces” and it’s like — you guys remember if you collected playing cards or coins, those binders with the little sleeves? This tweet got 468,000 likes. Probably one of the most popular tweets of all time. It’s just her organizing her sauces from around the world. That’s for collecting, not for use. The Advent calendar would be for use.
Sam: What I like about you, Steph, is you find things that I would just scroll past. You find interesting things and apply them — connecting five other things to them.
Shaan: When you scroll past something and think “this is stupid,” you write it down and make it sound smart. It’s amazing.
Sam: I waste my time curating an Evernote that’s just full of random internet stuff. But what you do differently is you actually remember it. I bookmark so much stuff and forget all about it. You actually remember it and connect it. It’s the difference between good and great — being organized. You’re very, very organized with this stuff. That actually helps your thought process.
Steph’s Career and Future Plans [01:26:00]
Sam: When are you just going to bail and start creating some of this stuff yourself?
Steph: I must have been 24 when I was working at a company and I thought, “This is the last job I’ll have. After this I’ll go do my own thing.” But ever since then I just keep getting offered really cool stuff. I’m like, “Oh, I get to be paid to go research trends and go down internet rabbit holes.” Then it’s like, “Now I’m at a16z and I get to be this interesting person with more money in my pocket.”
Shaan: You keep leveling up. She’s like three years old and says “this is my best day ever” — and she might actually be telling the truth. And that’s how I feel about Steph: whenever she gets a raise, this is her best day ever.
Sam: Steph, we were talking about how you’ve had a really nice financial run compared to where you came from. And if 21-year-old you were told where you’d be and how much you’d make and what opportunities you’d have?
Steph: It’s pretty wild. And you know what? I still — throughout my whole life, because I didn’t grow up very wealthy, I’ve had a very money-oriented mindset. Not that I need that much, but just like, “Oh my gosh, you have that much money — go buy a car, go buy nice clothes, go use the money you’ve always wanted but never had.” But it’s funny because now that I have more money I’m still just as cheap as I ever was. I don’t know if that stuff ever leaves you.
Shaan: Sean, did you know Steph is half Taiwanese? Her mom’s from Taiwan.
Sam: I didn’t know that. Why are you telling me this?
Shaan: At our old company when someone found that out there was like — people were like “Steph, why are you lying to us? You’re Canadian.” As if that’s the one nationality you can only be.
Steph: There’s a huge spectrum. Some people, when they hear I’m half Asian, are like, “Oh yeah, of course, I knew that.” And others are truly shocked. Jordan was one of those — he went to Sam and was like, “Does Sam know this?”
Money Psychology and Learning to Spend [01:33:00]
Shaan: On the being-cheap thing — I read a story yesterday about this guy who made a bunch of money and they asked him what was his first major purchase. He goes, “I hired a consultant to help me spend money.” He said, “I had learned over 25 years how to make money. It took me a long time to learn that, and I was honest with myself that I have no idea how to spend money.”
Sam: What was this coach called?
Shaan: A spending consultant. But what do they teach you?
Shaan: I imagine he does two things. One: figures out where your psychology around money is screwed up. Everybody has something — it’s like body dysmorphia, but for your bank account. You think you need more money than you need. Even when you have money you still act like you don’t. Like, “Dude, you’re fit now — why do you still think you’re fat?” You have to retrain yourself to see something different.
Shaan: The second thing: “What do you actually want?” Outline your dream lifestyle. Calculate how much those things cost. Could you afford them now? Could you afford a step in that direction? Give you the encouragement to pull the trigger on what you actually want. And protect your downside — set aside this amount so your safety reflex is satisfied. “We agree that having this amount untouched means you’re safe. Okay. Now we can talk about the spending part without triggering your fight-or-flight response around financial safety.”
Sam: I need one of these.
Steph: Yeah, I don’t know if this fully exists. Maybe it’s a job of the future.
Shaan: Isn’t this like early podcast episodes where millionaires are fretting about eight-dollar blueberries at Whole Foods? I remember one episode where this guy had at least 10 million dollars and was picking up a stroller on the side of the road. Clearly hadn’t upgraded his thinking to where he was.
Sam: Dude, I just made $400 selling used gym equipment from stuff I wasn’t using. This is my best day ever. I paid $300 for it five years ago and now I got $400. I feel more happy about that $400 than I do making much larger sums.
Shaan: I read this thing — a guy named Tomer, who has this company called Causal, an Excel competitor — he had this blog post about how to decide whether to buy something. He breaks it down into frequency — how often am I going to get the benefit — and magnitude of the benefit. Something doesn’t have to be a huge shift if it’s going to happen all the time. Like, I bought a phone case that just feels better in my hand, and it was a great purchase because I’m touching my phone all the time.
Sam: What’s the case?
Shaan: It’s called Mous. It’s got this feel — almost like the feel of a basketball, like a traction feel. Because I hate the plastic feel of cases. I don’t want leather either. This has the right feel.
Shaan: So he identifies: if you’re going to get frequent use, the magnitude needs to be less. If infrequent, the magnitude of the joy needs to be high. Multiply those two together to figure out the value of the item, then compare to the price. What people mostly get wrong is they undercount frequency. A better pillow is great because you sleep on it every single night. Versus a Louis Vuitton bag that just sits in your closet. My wife bought a Louis Vuitton bag and literally never takes it out — she doesn’t want it to get messed up. A six-thousand-dollar thing that just sits in a closet. Versus something you get joy out of all the time.
Shaan: I bet if you looked at your best purchases of the year, it’s probably either something you interact with frequently, or a one-off life-changing experience that was just crazy magnitude.
Sam: What was that article called? I need some good money therapy in my life.
Shaan: I’ll send it to you.
Closing [01:42:00]
Sam: Steph, appreciate you doing this. You’re always coming with fire. You’re a Twitter person still, right?
Steph: Yeah.
Sam: That’s Steph Smith — go follow her on Twitter. And go listen to the a16z podcast.
Steph: Yes, that’s just what it’s called — the a16z podcast. We’re doing some cool stuff there.
Sam: All right, we appreciate you. Thank you.
Steph: Thank you.