0:00
All right, this morning Sam text me a great idea.
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0:01
He goes, "Let's go back through the archive.
0:03
Let's find things that we predicted or opinion strong opinions that we had at the time, and let's bring them back up.
0:10
Let's see, did we get them right? Did we get them wrong? What did we get right? What did we get wrong?
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And what can we learn from it?"
0:15
And so, we're going to go back.
0:16
Nobody does this, by the way.
0:16
Everyone loves to make predictions and have opinions, and nobody ever goes back unless they were right.
0:21
Well, we're going to show you where we were wrong on a bunch of these.
0:25
We did seven or eight of these that um we had a strong opinion a couple of years ago, and now they've played out and we can review how we did.
0:32
And at the end, we make two new predictions.
0:34
So, two new things that things that have our spidey sense tingling, things that feel like they could be big opportunities that we're going to plant our flag and say, "Look, I think this is the This is one of the new ones."
0:44
And we'll see in 2 years if we're right or wrong.
0:47
That's at the end of the episode. All right, enjoy. All right, we're live. What are you drinking?
1:01
Uh this is my secret sauce right now.
1:03
I'm not telling people about this yet. Water? Nope.
1:07
You can see from the color it's a little different. Uh green water?
1:08
I'm just doing some experiments, you know?
1:11
I thought um you know, we had this we had Derek from More Plates More Dates on, and he was talking about pre-workout, right?
1:20
He created Gorilla Mind, that supplement.
1:22
And then we talked about Bucked Up, and they are a pre-workout supplement.
1:25
And basically, it's like people take a scoop of something before they go to their workout so that they get a way better pump.
1:31
And just really like sort of dilates the you know, vasodilation, and it gets them to have a better workout. I want that for work.
1:36
I want pre-workout for work, and so I am uh experimenting with some things that will How do I have like a boost of boost of focus, a boost of productivity?
1:50
Yeah, caffeine, I think it's called, but that's okay.
1:52
You don't you don't need to explain it.
1:54
Caffeine is for mere mortals.
1:58
Let me ask you a quick question.
1:58
All right, by the way, today's episode's going to be exciting.
2:00
So, we're going to actually get to go over some of the predictions that we've made, both right and wrong, since the pod started.
2:05
A lot of these predictions are going to come from the 2020 era.
2:08
We're going to look back when we We're going to call it What did you say? The I told you episode. I told you so. I told you so.
2:17
But it is also going to be I told you we are stupid and we get things wrong as well.
2:21
you so and sorry I told you that because I might have been wrong.
2:23
But But I got to But I definitely told you. I definitely told you.
2:27
I just want you to take your right hand.
2:28
I want you to put your right hand in the air real quick.
2:31
And I want you to reach back.
2:33
And let's give ourselves a little pat on the back here. Why?
2:34
Not because our predictions were so great, but because we're actually revisit revisiting predictions cuz predictions are one of these things that people love to do.
2:43
They love to People love to spout random opinions about stuff.
2:48
And then they just go They just It just all gets washed away in the noise of social media.
2:52
Rarely do people ever go back, and when they do go back, it's only for one reason, when they were right.
2:57
Nobody ever goes back and says, "You know what?
2:59
Nobody asked, but hey, I just want to tell you I think I was wrong about that about that one."
3:03
Or I was at least half wrong about that one.
3:04
And that's not the code we live by, not here, not us.
3:08
And so, we're going back.
3:11
Nobody asked us to do this.
3:11
We're going back and we're revisiting some of the [ __ ] we said, and we're trying to figure out were we right, were we wrong, or something in between.
3:19
And uh we have a handful of these that we're going to go back.
3:23
And these are, like you said, 2 3 years ago.
3:24
So, they've had time to bake, and uh we'll see how they play Not much time, but a little bit of time.
3:29
And the thing about predictions is I was uh you know, there's a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world right now. And I was curious.
3:33
I was like, you know, you and I have been having this discussion a little bit off the pod about like, where do you invest your money if you think the world's going to end?
3:41
Like, part thought exercise, part like, things are crazy.
3:43
And I was looking at like a lot of really smart people, smart money people, Bill Ackman, Ray Dalio. You cited Ray Dalio. You Well, Ray said this.
3:52
And my reply to you was, "Yeah, but he's been wrong about X, Y, and Z."
3:56
And I had to go and dive deep about where they were wrong cuz if you just read the Wikipedia page, you see when they are right.
4:01
Like Bill Ackman was right about all these things.
4:03
I was like, "Oh, but he actually lost a ton of money on this thing."
4:06
So, predictions are challenging because not only are they hard to make, but the people who get right get them right a bunch of times are also wrong a ton of times.
4:15
So, it's really challenging to know who to listen to.
4:18
It's like a batting average, right?
4:18
Like you can bat If you bat 300, you know, like I don't follow baseball anymore, but I think you're like an all-star.
4:25
And that means, you know, you're missing two out of three, right?
4:28
You are you're you're not hitting on two out of three.
4:30
Predictions are way way way worse than that, right?
4:32
Like if you're predicting correctly on 5 to 10% of your predictions, but you're right in a big way, meaning you're non-consensus.
4:40
So, your bet you're right about something that a lot of other people are wrong about, then you make a big, which is one of my one of my favorite quotes.
4:50
Uh I said this on the Chris Williamson pod.
4:52
Pessimists get to be right, and optimists get to be rich.
4:53
And so, one thing you will see when we go through these, I think, is that the times where we said, "Ah, it's not going to work."
5:01
Those are the ones where we have a higher hit rate, right?
5:02
Because pessimists naturally get to be right more often.
5:07
However, the money is made when you're an optimist about something that other people are pessimistic about.
5:11
Or as my father once told me, "Hey, even a blind squirrel find a nut once in a while." So, I love that quote.
5:21
Speaking of nuts and seeds, let me tell you about this first one.
5:22
So, a few years ago, I was interested in freezing sperm.
5:27
The reason I was interested in freezing sperm is because but okay. No, listen.
5:33
Men's Men's sperm count is going down like a crazy amount.
5:38
Remember Ben, our old producer Ben, had this big thread on Twitter where he was like he documented sperm count, and he like made some Jurassic prediction that like in 50 years like very small percentage of men are actually going to be able to procreate and this is actually a really big deal.
5:50
And so I've been I've been research I've been interested in that topic for a minute.
5:53
And so I tried for freezing my sperm and I actually re re looked at the episode that we talked about it and the episode was Sam's unboxing of his of his sperm kit or something like that. Yeah, cuz you had it.
6:08
You were like holding it up. Dude, here's the story.
6:11
I So like you have to like you know, you have to like get the sample.
6:14
First of all, to do it at a hospital, which I also did, you have to bring the specimen 30 minutes after capturing it.
6:24
So like if you're not close to a hospital, I don't know what you do.
6:26
You go in the room, you go in the parking lot, I don't know.
6:29
It's like a really weird thing to collect and it's a very shameful thing to hand to a nurse. parking area?
6:34
Is there a covered parking area you can pull into?
6:36
It's a very shameful thing.
6:38
Like when you walk into the doctor and drop the bag, it's way more Have you ever given pee?
6:41
It's like that's kind of shameful.
6:43
Giving sperm is is way worse.
6:46
And so I used making excuses.
6:47
I'm like, I just didn't have a lot of water today.
6:48
And they're like, we don't need to know.
6:51
I'm like, I captured the specimen though. Yeah.
6:53
It's a very shameful thing to do.
6:57
And I So anyway, I tried one of these at-home services and I brought it to my office cuz you have to you have to do it and then you have to refrigerate it and then you have to mail it in.
7:04
And I like packed it in a box within a box so no one even knew.
7:07
But I didn't have I had to do it at at lunchtime.
7:10
And people in my office were like, "What's in that What's that in the refrigerator? What's this box?"
7:14
And I was like, "Oh, it's it's just a it's just a thing. It's a thing."
7:17
But it says like it says it's like a biohazard or something on there.
7:20
And then eventually someone like was like, "All right, what is this?"
7:22
And I'm like, "It's my sperm."
7:24
And uh they got My employees got really angry at me and they like told HR and I was like, "I I I don't know what you want me to do, man.
7:32
I just This is what I had to do."
7:32
So So that's like a funny update.
7:34
But I was using I tried two services.
7:36
One was called Legacy, one was called Dadi, d a d i.
7:40
At the time, Legacy had raised $1. 5 million.
7:46
And the update on them is they've since raised a round of 3.
7:49
5, a round of 15 million, a round of 25 million. So what's that?
7:54
That's a 45 million dollars they've raised.
7:56
So I presume things are going well with them.
7:58
So the most recent round was in 2022.
8:00
Daddy, the company that I talked about at that point, it's it's kind of a weird name.
8:05
I don't really even like saying that.
8:06
They had only raised a Yeah. Yeah, it's weird, man.
8:12
So that company has since been acquired.
8:15
They were bought in 2022 for 100 million dollars.
8:17
So that is a a thing that we we nailed, I think.
8:19
Uh And I think you almost had back-to-back episodes cuz you also were talking about uh TRT uh we said D2C TRT.
8:28
We I think we were like six six letters.
8:33
If you want to make 100 million dollars, D2C TRT, and we were both like that's a great idea.
8:37
And I thought you were going to start that company.
8:39
Cuz I was like this is genuinely like crazy. idea.
8:42
You researched it, and I was like you're kind of shameless enough to go do that.
8:47
But you didn't do it, but you did introduce me to the company that was doing it, I think.
8:51
both invested in it, right?
8:52
invested in it, it's doing fantastic.
8:54
It's a company called Hone.
8:54
And um they've gone I mean they're gangbusters.
8:58
Every one of their updates is fantastic.
9:00
So Yeah, I think we nailed that.
9:01
That was a That was a right prediction, I would say.
9:03
And those were both off the beaten path.
9:05
I don't think a whole lot of entrepreneurs were were thinking about capturing the specimen, so to speak.
9:10
And uh you were, and that it paid off.
9:13
I think I invested at a 10 or 15 million dollar valuation.
9:17
I don't actually I haven't read their updates cuz it I think it got sent to my old email.
9:22
If you're listening to this, Hone, update my email.
9:25
But uh I imagine that business is worth nine figures, I would think.
9:27
I think it's worth 10 times what we invested in it.
9:31
Um so anyway, that's a that that's an interesting one, TRT and um uh sperm collection. Yeah.
9:39
That those are those are correct.
9:42
I can't find this client info.
9:42
Have you heard of HubSpot?
9:45
HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application.
9:49
Every team can stay aligned.
9:51
No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot, grow better.
9:58
Let's do one that was maybe incorrect.
10:01
So, we were bullish I don't know if we were bullish, but we were very fascinated on BitClout.
10:05
Another thing that we were fascinated is I remember the day you told me about what an NFT was.
10:10
When you explained it to me, I thought it was awesome.
10:12
You're like, I just bought this Kobe thing this Kobe card, and I was like, all right, that's kind of cool.
10:16
And then it things the world went a little bit crazy.
10:19
that one was actually amazing, which is like it was it was genuinely beautiful to look at, whereas like NFTs then became like I got this rock, I have this squiggle, and it was like, uh okay, you know, like you're trying to make a buck only.
10:32
There is no like art aspect to this.
10:35
And I think you paid $500.
10:38
I think I paid we paid $700 or something like that, and then we flipped it for 10,000 like I don't know, 30 days later.
10:45
It was actually credit to Ben.
10:47
So, Ben was the one who got us talking to a bunch of NFT guys early on, and um you know, the right move would have been to just go like go crazy on it for a while or invest in the companies behind it, but I saw that this artist I really like, Boss Logic, was doing one, and the Kobe one looked great. I bought it.
11:04
And then when I saw it sell for 10,000, I was like, I mean, it doesn't look that great.
11:10
Like, how I'll sell it to this guy, and I can still look at it whenever I want.
11:14
Well, so I was out of there.
11:16
The other thing we talked about was BitClout.
11:17
So, episode 164, March 26, 2021, I said I signed up to this thing called BitClout cuz my friend Ryan Ryan Beagleman called me, and he said, this thing looks cool. Let's try it.
11:28
Um and so, we both you and I both signed up for it.
11:33
It was all the rage for a minute.
11:33
So BitClout Ryan was on that episode.
11:35
So he he kind of was pitching it.
11:37
He called us before, told us to get on, and then he pitched it to us on the episode. So what did he say?
11:42
So BitClout, by the way, it's basically a social It was basically Twitter, but there was a crypto component where you could buy into someone's Right, you don't just follow Sam, you basically buy some of the Sam coin, and if Sam is going to get more popular, other people are going to buy the Sam coin as well, because that's how you kind of subscribe or follow the person.
12:01
And so you could kind of We've all had this moment where you see somebody early on, you're like, "Oh man, this person's awesome.
12:05
They're going to get big."
12:05
And BitClout was organized such that you could do that.
12:08
And it also had almost like, because of that, it had a Patreon built in.
12:11
It's like, "Oh, I already have all these kind of paying shareholders.
12:14
I could just create content just for them.
12:19
Only if you own X amount of my coin, you get to access this content."
12:21
Which is what Only Fans and then the Twitter Blue subscribers and Patreon, they all do a version of this.
12:27
So it was like baked in from the start versus usually those are third-party services. And it was a service.
12:32
It was one of the very few crypto things I actually thought was interesting.
12:35
You said, uh, you said I think you were saying it's interesting because you do the Ryan one first.
12:39
So Ryan goes, "I remember when Facebook came to my college, and we were one of the first colleges. It was really fun.
12:44
This is the first time I felt like that a long time.
12:47
That's why I wanted to come on the show."
12:50
And then you jumped in, you were like, "Yeah, two big differences though.
12:52
One, you didn't have to have money on Facebook.
12:56
You just, you know, you just could go use it.
13:00
Um, and two, like, you're putting money into this thing that we don't know the people behind this.
13:04
We don't know who who how it's working.
13:06
Like, it's a little nerve-wracking, and you don't even And there was no withdrawal button at the time.
13:10
And you're even withdraw money from it.
13:11
You're like, "Hey, red flag.
13:12
Money can only go in, and it can't come out."
13:14
And then we were like, "Nah, don't worry about all that, bro. Like, downer over here."
13:22
And And I said, here's my quote.
13:24
"I don't know is this a is if I don't know if this is a scam.
13:26
It kind of looks scammy to me.
13:28
And then I had found out who's behind it.
13:30
They were anonymous at the time, but I had found out who was behind it by asking around.
13:35
I said, I do know the founders, they're legit people in the tech scene, and they do have a reputation in our circles, and they had they had raised I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars from Andreessen Horowitz and others like but it had the founder on.
13:47
Later we had the founder on.
13:47
And then and I said, you know, and what I liked about it I was like, you know, today um if I sell on Amazon, I keep 70% of of what I of the value I'm creating being a merchant on Amazon.
14:00
If I stream on on on YouTube, I'm keeping, you know, 70% of what I what I um actually not 70%, more like it's like a 60/40 split of the of the ad revenue.
14:10
Um Twitch is, you know, roughly 50%.
14:13
Then you go down to like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the users at the time captured zero.
14:19
Like those were multi multi multi multi-billion dollar companies that the users who created all of the content and consumed all of the content, users did all of the work to create the value of the network, were getting nothing.
14:32
I said, well, it does seem like crypto's kind of cool cuz it can it can change that.
14:35
It can basically reward the people who do the work, who create the content on the on these networks.
14:42
Um and the second thing is we loved the growth hack.
14:44
So, what they had done was they took all the popular Twitter people and they just pre-bought a bunch of their coins.
14:51
So, when I joined I think there was like $75,000 of value for me to just go claim.
14:59
And I was like, hmm, okay.
15:01
Uh I'll push that button, let's see what happens.
15:04
And uh and so they had used the money they raised to buy up popular people's coins, and then to to claim your coins you had to be like sign up for your account and tweet out hey, I'm verifying my BitClout.
15:15
And that was kind of going viral for a bit.
15:17
And that mechanic worked until it didn't work and BitClout failed.
15:22
And we know several people personally, Dharmesh, and a few others that invested millions of dollars publicly into BitClout.
15:32
And that one And so, you you know, smart people were doing it.
15:34
It was an interesting idea.
15:35
Ultimately, that idea failed.
15:37
And so, I would say, you know, we were excited I I was more excited about it than you, for sure.
15:43
Um you were like immediately I think we were pretty much out. Correct?
15:45
Well, I I I was out, but I liked the idea of it.
15:48
The idea of it was actually fairly interesting.
15:50
I like the I like the free money. Yeah. Well, no.
15:51
Like Twitter ended up doing it, where they just like gave you money.
15:56
So, I get paid, I think $3,000 a year.
15:59
It's on track for $3,000 a year for tweeting and like getting impressions.
16:03
I that's cool, but you didn't need the crypto component of it.
16:07
No, but that's different.
16:07
You got You get paid a share of ad revenue.
16:08
Me for following you um early on, kind of being one of your early early believers, for retweeting your content, for all that stuff, I couldn't I couldn't benefit from that, right?
16:20
So, it's Yeah, but it's the same outcome for me as as the creator.
16:22
I get like I feel a little bit more bought in. Well, well, no.
16:24
Cuz like, what was your last Twitter check? $50?
16:28
Uh whatever 3,000 divided by 12 is. $300 maybe? Something like that? $400 maybe?
16:34
So, let's say you made $400.
16:36
BitClout early on, when it had, I don't know, 50,000 users or something like that? Yeah, you're at 75,000.
16:42
My account was worth $750,000.
16:42
Like, you know, I could have I could have literally pushed the button and cashed that out if I had wanted to.
16:48
out of a little bit of it.
16:48
Someone bought a bunch for Someone was like, "Hey, I'll give you Ethereum for all this."
16:52
And I was like, "Pfft, yours." I sold it.
16:57
So, uh so someone bought me a bunch The funny thing, do you know there's a new one that's basically the same model and it's crushing right now? FriendTech or something? FriendTech, yeah.
17:03
I'm not on it right now, just cuz I have been busy with other stuff, but it's I mean, it's generated like 250 million in revenue as a like as a for the project itself.
17:13
And I think it's distributed the equal amount to to uh people have generated that much on it as well.
17:20
So, then it sounds like BitClout Well, let's do an update on BitClout, but it sounds like we were wrong about BitClout and that it BitClout didn't work.
17:27
The idea did work in FriendTech, right?
17:31
I think I would bet that in the long horizon let's call it 20 years um these networks will be built in with these networks will will do this.
17:40
They will have a currency for the users on the network.
17:43
And so the users will the users who contribute to the network will own and control the the network.
17:48
So, I do believe that that's going to be true.
17:51
FriendTech I think is like another kind of like attempt.
17:53
I don't think it's probably the one, um, but I do think over the long haul somebody will do that.
17:57
So, where's BitClout now?
17:59
Um, it they changed this thing called DESO. I think, right?
18:03
The Yeah, they're doing a bunch of stuff.
18:05
I don't I haven't kept up with it, but yeah, BitClout they were like, "Oh, that was just one app on top of the DESO protocol."
18:09
And then the DESO protocol had like many apps, the Diamond app and this app, um, I don't think any uh the honest truth is I don't think any of it's gotten off the ground in a in a meaningful way.
18:19
All right, pick a winner.
18:21
Or pick don't don't pick a winner, pick an interesting one.
18:24
Okay, an interesting one Okay, Clout Kitchens.
18:26
So, um, way back we did an episode.
18:30
Let me find the I think we were talking about My Cookie Dealer and a bunch of other uh No, you weren't there.
18:37
So, I came over to your office to record one day, you could make it for whatever reason and you were like, "Oh, my buddy Stu who had been kind of listening to some episodes to five or six uh was there and he was like, I'll jump in."
18:48
And he jumped in and he had a bunch of ideas.
18:50
One of the ideas he had was he he goes um, you know how Travis Kalanick has left Uber and he's got this idea of cloud kitchen.
18:57
So, he's like, you know, I'm going to create these restaurants that are just built for Uber Eats, built for DoorDash and they'll be delivery only.
19:05
There's no physical location, blah blah blah.
19:07
He goes, "Well, there's a better he's he I I another idea." Clout Kitchens.
19:11
And I was like, clout kitchens, what do you mean?
19:13
He He was like, you know, social media guys who have clout, you know, they have this like, you know, they have a big influence.
19:19
He's like, I think they're going to open up their own restaurant.
19:20
Just like, you know, there's Margaritaville and there's and Gordon Ramsay has his restaurants or whatever, you're going to see celebrities create their own restaurant brands.
19:30
Uh they're just going to license their name and face to somebody.
19:34
And then, fast forward like, I don't know, a year, year and a half, Mr. Beast Burger comes out. And Mr.
19:40
Beast, one of the biggest social influencers, launches his own virtual restaurant chain, exactly as Stu had predicted.
19:47
And at the beginning, it looks great cuz the launch is insane.
19:49
There's videos of people just like going and trying to to order this stuff.
19:56
And I think it did over 100 million in sort of gross revenue, uh you know, just sort of purchases of from from Beast Burger. In year one. In year one.
20:04
And so, it looked like at the time, damn, Stu called it. Great idea.
20:10
However, clout kitchens thing has a couple of issues. One is uh It's hard.
20:13
Really hard to control quality. Why Why?
20:16
Cuz the way these work are they're just mom-and-pop restaurants and they send the packaging to them.
20:22
They're like, hey, if an order comes in that's in your area, you're going to make a burger.
20:26
Just make whatever burger you normally make.
20:27
Just try to make a good burger, a good cheeseburger, but wrap it up in this Beast Burger packaging and put it over here.
20:33
The guy's going to come pick it up.
20:35
And that's how clout kitchens work.
20:37
It just gives existing restaurants extra order flow.
20:39
But because of that, you have total like no control over quality because you have, you know, 400 operators each making a different recipe, each with a different uh you know, sort of quality control around this. And at some point, Mr.
20:54
Beast was like, you dude, this is actually bad for my brand.
20:55
People are ordering, it's like not not right, it's not good, whatever.
20:58
I need to distance myself with this.
21:01
And now they're in a lawsuit with each other cuz they're like, nope, you signed the you signed your rights to to us.
21:04
We're going to keep calling it this.
21:05
And uh you're hurting our business by saying that and so he now he can't really talk about it.
21:10
So it kind of That That doesn't sound a failure though.
21:11
I mean, but it's a failure for him.
21:13
It poor execution, but it could work.
21:15
You know, it just so happen he was the biggest, you know, at the time or still is and it got too big too fast.
21:21
That doesn't mean it's a bad a bad concept.
21:24
And I still think if someone's going to do this, you could do this.
21:25
You just need to like have a much more controlled skew.
21:28
So somebody needs to do it with like just like I don't know, cookies or they need to do it with a um Like they need to do like you know, what's it called?
21:38
The edible eats edible arrangements or whatever.
21:40
It's like here's a gift you can send somebody.
21:44
It's like you know, you need some celebrity who's going to just like create the version of edible arrangements on top of DoorDash or whatever.
21:52
Just like this gifting thing that's like can be more consistent.
21:54
So maybe you could just send the final thing to each location.
21:58
I think Reed told us on the pod when they launched Beast Burger, he was like me and Jimmy were just like in a bedroom.
22:04
We threw it together in 90 days.
22:06
Like he made it sound like pretty ragtag.
22:09
Like it was just like oh, let's just throw it out there and see what happens.
22:13
I don't I don't know if that's the truth.
22:14
That's the kind of the energy that was implied and you know, so just didn't work out for execution reasons, but it could still happen.
22:23
Um okay, here's one that we were Okay, I'll give you two that I was right but pessimistic about. So um Clubhouse.
22:32
So I wrote a Twitter thread that was a kind of like the thing that blew up my Twitter for a while.
22:38
I wrote a Twitter thread that basically was telling people why like Clubhouse was the hot name at the time.
22:41
It was it went from like nobody was on it to the cool kids are on it to this is you know, a $2 billion company all the course of like a year you know, less than a year, right?
22:54
This thing was just like flying.
22:57
And it was like oh, this is the next social network and all the big names were believers in this thing.
23:00
I remember Uh I remember being like I enjoyed being on it, but I was like, "Oh, this is not going to work for certain reasons."
23:08
And then I would hear really smart people, you know, Marc Andreessen invest in this thing.
23:12
Andrew Chen, you know, the social guy, oh, he's investing in this thing.
23:15
Then you hear Naval who's an investor in it and he's like um "This will be bigger than Twitter."
23:21
And then uh you know, Sahil from Gumroad, I remember listening to him on a Clubhouse thing and he's like um "Clubhouse will be bigger than Twitter because everybody can speak and not everybody can write."
23:29
And I was like, "That's not how this works.
23:31
You can't just be like my app is called breathe and everybody breathes, so I'm going to be the most valuable company."
23:38
Like I was like, "What is this logic?" And I wrote this thread.
23:40
I said it "Hey, everything's Clubhouse could be the next big thing.
23:45
I think it's going to fail and here's how I think it goes down." I wrote this thread. The thread goes viral.
23:47
Yeah, you had like celebrities reach out.
23:50
Isn't that how you met uh Hasan Minhaj and who else? Yeah, I think so.
23:56
There was a bunch of people that were like, you know, I don't want to I don't want to like name drop, you know what I mean, but like yeah, there was it was crazy.
24:01
It was people that I admired.
24:02
Yeah, it was like your heroes.
24:04
I don't I mean like I like some of these podcasts, the sports podcasts uh guys who you Yeah, people people who were famous, you know, authors or or writers or whatever either followed or DM'd me like, "That's Well, that was so so so good."
24:14
So I was like, "Wow, that was great."
24:16
But I also got blocked by a bunch of VCs who were in vent Marc Andreessen blocked me.
24:22
They're like, you know, you know, they go from following to blocking like instantaneously. Why?
24:25
Cuz I like, you know, I told them that maybe their investment wouldn't work out.
24:28
And um and I got some hate.
24:31
Some people were like, "Oh, why are you rooting for a startup to fail?"
24:34
I said, "I didn't say I'm rooting for it.
24:35
I just think You actually in the thing you said, "I don't want them to fail.
24:37
I just have experience in this space and it doesn't I I don't think it's going to turn out nicely."
24:41
Yeah, but I think rightfully so people don't believe that where it's like, "Look, I wish you the best."
24:45
They say that like when they're fighting like I look, "I wish you good luck."
24:49
And it's like, "No, you don't."
24:50
But I think you know, fast forward, I don't know when that was.
24:53
I think that was 2021, so fast forward 2 years now and uh I feel like not just was I right that Clubhouse failed, step by step cuz I was like, this is what they're going to do.
25:03
They're going to realize that this doesn't like that they can't grow the thing this way.
25:07
They're going to then launch a recording feature cuz they're going to say, "Ah, you're missing the live show, just record it.
25:12
We're going to optimize towards people who creating shows versus people just hanging out."
25:15
And they're going to try recording, and then no one's going to watch the recordings.
25:20
And then here's what they're going to do.
25:21
They're going to be like, "We looked at the data and actually yeah, people don't watch these recordings cuz the what makes a great live show isn't as good in a isn't a well-edited recording."
25:30
Um so then they're going to be like, "You know who really uses this?
25:31
People who hang out and make friends on this.
25:32
And we're going to switch to a hangout product."
25:35
And sure enough, they switched to a hangout product.
25:37
And they did basically each of the steps except for the last one which I predicted was like, you know, they end up sort of fire selling it to Facebook for, you know, whatever, $70 million and then he becomes a product manager of Facebook like, you know, that part hasn't hasn't happened yet.
25:50
Um but pretty much step by step.
25:52
So that one was was a right but pessimistic.
25:56
And you know, I guess one takeaway is doesn't really matter to be right when it's pessimistic.
26:01
There's nothing really that great comes of it.
26:05
You kind of look like an [ __ ] even if you're right. Yeah, exactly.
26:06
I'm like and then I'm like, "Oh, great.
26:08
Now I'm like, yeah, I told you they would fail."
26:11
And it's like, "Oh, okay."
26:15
Speaking of things that you say that you don't really mean, did I tell you about that time that a kid flew in from England? No, what?
26:22
One time when the Hustle was getting started, this kid called me from England.
26:25
He goes, "I love the Hustle."
26:26
And I was like, "All right, let's talk."
26:28
I started talking to him and we just [ __ ] At the end I go, "Yeah, if you're ever in SF, just let me know and and we'll help you out."
26:34
And I meant it as like a way to end the conversation, and I learned that moment you should never say that.
26:39
I get a message 3 weeks later and he goes, "Hey Sam, it's the guy from England.
26:43
Um so my flight lands my flight lands tomorrow."
26:49
And he just shows up and and we have Hustle Con like my big event and we make him work the whole event and we're like here you can sleep on our couch and we dress him up in a Texas outfit.
26:59
He's never been to America before.
27:00
We gave him cowboy boots and a hat that we had in the office and we called him Texas Sam the whole weekend and he stayed with us for like five days all because on the phone I was like yeah you know so now I don't say those things anymore.
27:10
If I don't mean it I try not to say it.
27:12
sounds like an amazing experience. That sounds awesome.
27:15
Well it was only no it could have been it could have been bad.
27:18
out of lemons situation for you.
27:18
Um well it was it was it could have been horrible. What was the other one?
27:22
You had two was it Thrasio?
27:23
Thrasio yeah so Thrasio was this company that was buying up all the buying it was a roll up an aggregator of Amazon Amazon brands Amazon affiliate brands. growing startups ever.
27:34
I think they went from zero to a a billion dollars in market cap or evaluation in like 12 months.
27:40
And tons of revenue and then tons of copycats cuz everyone was like oh Thrasio one of the fastest growing startups in the world we're going to repeat this and And we had friends who did it too.
27:51
Some of our friends went and did the same thing where they bought a bunch of Amazon businesses. May they rest in peace.
27:55
Uh but yeah it didn't work right? That's the the problem.
27:58
So you know I remember calling Andrew Wilkinson and I was like yeah what do you think about this Thrasio stuff?
28:03
And I was like I was like I kind of get it cuz you know they're doing you know like roll I think roll ups in general are just like a a really nice blueprint for a business.
28:14
This roll up kind of makes sense.
28:14
Andrew had done a semi roll up with Shopify apps and so I was like do you see this as like you know a really good opportunity what do you think?
28:25
And he goes I think they're picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.
28:28
And I had never heard that before but I guess that's a phrase like a like a Charlie Munger type phrase.
28:31
If Andrew says anything interesting it most likely came from Charlie Munger. That's his hero.
28:38
Uh and Charlie is like has wonderful phrases.
28:40
So most of the stuff most of the wisdom he has is from Charlie Munger.
28:44
And I go what do you mean?
28:44
He's like it's like picking up a penny in front of a steamroller like you know, you're going to pick them up you're picking up these little kind of like what seems like these little cheap free cheap assets and you think it's all going well until you get completely run over.
28:54
And if you fast forward till today, that's pretty much exactly what played out.
28:58
These guys bought up a bunch of businesses, they rolled up what looked like a lot of revenue and then they got run over.
29:05
And at the time, we did an episode and the things we had said were basically um so I basically took Andrew's point of view and I was like that does feel more right than the other way.
29:16
And I said, well, what what could be the problems?
29:19
And I was like basically these FBA businesses are not very durable.
29:21
So, if you're going to do a roll up, you kind of want durability to be one of the highest characteristics.
29:25
Like normally in business we think growth is the best thing, but actually when you're buying businesses it's more about not being wrong than it is about everything going right.
29:35
And so, you want durability when you're rolling these up. They bought trash.
29:39
They bought like they would buy like um um one of the thousand vendors on Amazon selling Chinese dog leashes for $25. You know what I mean?
29:50
Like they I think they bought trash.
29:53
And so like, you know, Amazon uh is not durable for many reasons.
29:55
Number one, uh the you know, like the your your spot in the rankings for these commodity products really matters and like it's a constant battle to keep to to get your ranking to stay high, which includes things like people going and leaving fake reviews on your thing so that your account gets taken down.
30:10
Like, oh, let me just spam you with reviews so that Amazon detects you and then de-list you, right? That's [ __ ] like that.
30:16
Or copycats or people who pay more or whatever.
30:21
Then there's Amazon themselves launching Basics.
30:23
So, every good category, Amazon's like, cool.
30:26
Here's the Amazon Basics.
30:26
And oh, what do you know, it's at the top, right?
30:28
Like that was also happening.
30:28
Then there was the last thing that's sort of the death blow, which is Andrew at Tiny, they sort of believe what I think a few other of these like hold co types believe, which is that synergies are massively overrated.
30:41
That like it's a very easy to talk yourself into we're going to buy these five companies and then synergy.
30:49
And it's like, what synergy?
30:51
It's like, um we're going to centralize the back office and we're going to uh cross-promote with each other.
30:57
It's like, no, actually none of these brands had enough brand love for you to cross-promote anything.
31:02
You didn't Nobody trusted you.
31:04
Um the synergies in the back office actually just turned into like a bunch of people not really watching what was going on in these individual businesses the way they were when it was just one person owning them.
31:13
So, what's the update on them?
31:14
So, Thrasio is basically dead.
31:16
Um it's I don't know if I don't know exactly what the stage is.
31:18
Is it I'd say either fire sale, bankruptcy, but it's dead.
31:22
And so are all of the aggregators.
31:25
And so now there's like the opposite phenomenon.
31:26
There's like a deloading and which is actually probably a better opportunity to go pick the best 10 assets from all these aggregators who are completely underwater and they just have to, you know, basically get rid of all these assets.
31:38
And so, um yeah, it Thrasio and all the Thrasio copycats did not work out.
31:43
All right, I'll tell you one that we uh I wasn't exactly right and the times that this turned out to be true, it didn't play out how I thought it was going to.
31:52
So, something that I've talked to you about I think since 2019, 2020 was privacy.
31:57
So, if you look back on some of our episodes when we were still in the old office, so this was 2019, I had this insight from the founder of Pandora.
32:05
So, Pandora is the music service.
32:09
The founder one time told me he was like, yeah, like many of our users are like middle of America like dentists who like have Pandora playing in the background.
32:18
And what we've noticed about them is they sometimes won't sign up because they don't want to click the link that says they agree to our terms and services and our privacy statements.
32:25
And to me, that meant the average Joe cares more about privacy than a lot of people think.
32:32
At the time, 2019, the wasn't that big of a thing where you you just click yes no matter what.
32:40
I think that that and and so I predicted there's going to be a lot of businesses that are going to be created on top of that.
32:45
Another example that I had was DuckDuckGo.
32:47
DuckDuckGo is a privacy search engine that doesn't like track you in the same way Google does.
32:53
Their searches have gone up like crazy and the business has gone on to raise a hundred million dollars of which most of it I believe was a secondary sale.
32:58
So, they're quietly killing it.
33:02
But I thought that this was going to be more popular than it has been.
33:03
It's kind of gotten popular because TikTok.
33:05
Uh so, I think in Minnesota it is or Montana it is.
33:13
Uh they have banned or trying to ban TikTok for privacy reasons.
33:15
They're mostly doing it because they don't like China not because necessarily So, this is where I was wrong.
33:21
They're doing it for the Chinese purpose not exactly the privacy purpose.
33:25
But I thought that this was by now going to be a lot more popular than it is.
33:29
It's slowly growing but it is not if you give up all your data but you better give it up to an American company. Yeah.
33:36
You better give it up to us. Yeah.
33:36
So, that has that we didn't I didn't nail that yet.
33:40
I but I'm I'm still I'm still holding out but it I thought by now it would have picked up a little bit but it hasn't.
33:46
So, I'm I'm going to give you one that we got right and wrong at the same time.
33:51
Meaning, we did an episode back in 2020.
33:54
July of 2020, COVID has been like raging for 3 months and we do an episode called is GPT-3 the next big thing. Episode number 94. We're like in 500 now. This is 94.
34:07
And we had gotten access to this tool called GPT-3 which at the time you had to like get an API key.
34:12
They had to you had to borrow that.
34:14
You had to get a friend to get you an invite to get GPT-3. that good. It was okay.
34:18
We were pretty stunned by it mostly because we're 12-year-olds and we like made it write like a rap song in the form of Cardi B for us and we were like this is hilarious. This is amazing.
34:29
It just wrote a rap like this rap is actually I said write a rap by Cardi B and the title of the rap was walk that plank and it was a very long It was like it had rhymes as if Cardi B was saying it.
34:41
It was a very very long both so impressed and we were like, this is amazing.
34:47
And we were we were basically like, hey, this is super cool uh blah blah.
34:49
And we so we correctly back in July 2020 before ChatGPT became the fastest growing product of all time before OpenAI became a hundred-billion-dollar company before AI was the was the trend we said we released an episode with the title is GPT-3 the next big thing. Answer was yes.
35:11
However, I count this as an L. Why?
35:15
Cuz we just giggled about the rap lyrics and didn't do [ __ ] else.
35:18
We didn't do anything about of it.
35:19
You know, the move the the optimal move was drop everything and go work for OpenAI. Which which you said.
35:26
You said in one of the episodes, you said, if I'm smart, I should drop everything and go work in that area.
35:30
And I'm not smart, turns out, right?
35:35
Then I proved to myself that I was not smart.
35:37
I could have There was a hundred ways to make a hundred million dollars with this.
35:41
I could have started a company using GPT-3 as the the backbone, which the guys from Jasper did.
35:45
They were like, oh, let's use this to help marketers write blog posts, write tweet storms, write captions, write anything.
35:55
That story needs to play out still though.
35:56
Yeah, but they built a company that like got to one of the fastest growing companies I've ever seen.
36:00
Like like getting ARR over fifty million dollars in one year is like insane.
36:04
And so, could have started a company, could have gone and worked for OpenAI, could have invested in the OpenAI spin-outs like Anthropic, which is now a twenty-billion-dollar company, or you know, name the go through the list.
36:17
Could have um What else could I have done?
36:20
I could have just Yeah, so between investing, starting a company, or joining a company, there There a lot of different ways to capitalize on that opportunity that we identified. But I didn't.
36:32
And I think this has happened, you know, many times where you're sort of like you the opportunity you know, the elephant in the room is the opportunity and you're just sort of like, "Oh, that's cool.
36:40
There's an elephant over there."
36:41
Versus being like, "Oh my god, wait, stop everything I'm doing and let me reassess what I'm doing in order to analogy? You kill the elephant?
36:48
Are you going to kill the elephant? look. Look.
36:53
You know how it is with analogies on the fly.
36:56
Sometimes you got to weave two and two together.
36:59
Do you kill the elephant?
36:59
You going to kill the elephant?
37:00
Sometimes the elephant needs to strike while the iron's hot.
37:02
Now you got an elephant that's striking iron, right?
37:05
Like we don't know what this is.
37:06
the elephant's in Rome, my friend.
37:08
It's like that Michael Scott that Michael Scott episode of The Office where he's like, "Sometimes I just start a sentence and I have no idea where it's going to go."
37:17
That's podcasting for you.
37:17
Okay, so let me preface this.
37:20
I one of the things I like to take pride in is even they're hiring people before before they get like before they kind of reach their the pinnacle of their career.
37:29
I also like this on the podcast when we find interesting people and we talk about them.
37:35
A lot of times they're still popular, but we got them we got them before the curve.
37:40
One of them was Andrew Huberman.
37:40
We interviewed Andrew Huberman.
37:42
I forget exactly when, but when I remember when he interviewed us, he was just using his airpod headphones looking at his laptop like it looked like he was in a like a bathroom or something.
37:51
Like he like was like as if he was like random like some room, you know, it wasn't like a big deal.
37:56
So that one was a cool one.
37:56
So I got somebody here that this is all you.
38:00
So you come on the episode one day and you go, "You know this guy Brian Johnson?"
38:03
And I'm like, "Nah, not really."
38:04
You're like, "You know Venmo?"
38:06
I'm like, "Yeah, of course."
38:06
And you're like, "Well, it's owned by a company called Braintree." You know Braintree? I'm like, "Vaguely.
38:10
Payments company, something."
38:14
And you go, "Listen to this guy's story."
38:15
So this guy's story is basically Brian Johnson I'm not going to do his whole life story, but like interesting kind of early on door-to-door sales type of guy, ends up creating a tech company, Braintree buys Venmo, sells Braintree to PayPal for like 700-800 million dollars, creates this like Neuralink type of thing, this brain reader.
38:37
And you're like, but forget all that.
38:39
I'm like, forget all that. That was a lot. That was amazing.
38:40
You're like, forget all of it.
38:41
Go to this website, and it's like size six font.
38:48
It looks like I'm reading from a like a textbook.
38:50
And you're like, this guy is measuring every part of his body.
38:54
Every single organ, um he is measuring it, and then he is optimizing it, and he's doing crazy [ __ ] And look at this, he's been doing this for like a year.
39:01
And I had never heard of this.
39:03
Most people had never heard of this.
39:04
Bryan Johnson now, I would say like I think he's kind of tipped where like actually in the tech industry, everybody knows about him.
39:12
Yeah, but even some mainstream people, they'll they'll they'll call him the guy who's trying not to die or something like that. Yeah, oh that guy. Yeah, I've seen him. He looks weird. Right?
39:19
Like it's like the like cuz I bring him up in like every conversation I can find an excuse to cuz he's fascinating.
39:23
And people are like, that's crazy.
39:25
Oh, I don't I just don't feel like that's going to work. Right?
39:28
But it's like a very polarizing thing.
39:29
But you found this early, and you were watching him, you were like talking about it.
39:32
Then we got him on the pod early on.
39:35
Yeah, and we're about to release a new another episode.
39:37
I went to his house, we recorded another one.
39:38
But like I feel like you spotted This was your Uber angel investment, right?
39:43
You spotted Bryan Johnson way before anybody else was really paying attention to him.
39:47
Let me explain the story.
39:48
It's been long enough I can tell the story finally.
39:51
Here's how I found out about Bryan. I I I can't name names.
39:53
I have a friend that was going on a first date with this lady he had just met.
39:58
And he goes, "Hey Sam, I'm going to take this lady, she seems awesome.
40:02
I'm going to take her on a first date.
40:03
I'm going to take her I have a little plane.
40:04
I want to take her up in the plane, and we're going to fly around F1.
40:07
You know, F1 was in Austin.
40:09
We're going to go above the stadium, and it's going to be an ordeal.
40:11
Would you and Sarah like to come on this double date?
40:13
I would love it if you'd come." We said, "Yeah, sure."
40:15
Sarah gets sick, and I text him.
40:17
I go, "Hey man, Sarah's not in anymore, but I'll still go." And so, I go. third wheel?
40:26
I third wheel on this date and we go on this date and she's a lovely woman, whatever, and she it wasn't trying to be cool, but I was trying to hype up my buddy and I go, "Hey lady, have you ever been in a plane on a first date?
40:42
Like this is pretty cool."
40:42
She wasn't trying to damp the mood or, you know, like rub it in this guy's face, but she goes, "Oh yeah, you know, this other guy I used to date it. He he liked to fly." And we're like, "Huh?"
40:52
So, we ask a few more questions and we're like, "What does he fly?"
40:54
And she named some jet that's like a 40 billion or 40 million dollar jet. And we're like, "What?"
41:00
And she's and and then she says something like, "Yeah, but he likes to fly it himself, but he has a staff."
41:05
And we're like, "Who the hell is this guy?"
41:06
And so, I Google it, like who this person is and that's how I find Brian.
41:10
It was she used to date him and that's how I find out about him and I just start Googling and I come across Blueprint that he just launched a few weeks prior and I'm like, "This guy's amazing."
41:21
That's how I FOUND BRIAN JOHNSON.
41:26
HOW DID THAT DATE go though? It didn't work out.
41:30
decision by you to join the date? I joined the date.
41:32
Dude, it's them it's them two in the front two seats and me in the back.
41:39
And I had the headset and but I'm like putting my hands over there like, "Hey guys, like It was so funny.
41:49
I HAD NEVER BEEN UP IN A PLANE like that.
41:51
I was like, I'm not passing this up. Can I still go?
41:56
And I was piping them up the whole time.
41:58
I was like, "Hey guy, have you told lady about that one time you did this amazing thing?"
42:04
But you're doing it through the plane headset thing which is like you have to yell.
42:06
Yeah, but I'm still leaning up. Hey. How about the time?
42:13
Yeah, like Did you tell her about the time that you paid for everyone's dinner that was $2,000, Roger?
42:21
Yeah, I was like I'm trying to like pip him up while I'm wearing this headset. You're like pointing.
42:27
I was like, "Hey, we could go there next week."
42:30
I was like, "Hey, uh guy, did you tell uh lady about the time that you had the uh box seats at the F1 and you took all of your friends cuz you're so nice?" Yeah, it was like that.
42:38
That But they It didn't work out though. I tried my best, guy. I'm sorry.
42:42
You know who you are if you're listening to this.
42:43
That's uh that's hilarious.
42:45
You um you had a couple more on here.
42:48
I don't know if you have time, but you had a couple more on here that that look kind of interesting.
42:52
So, you had uh do paid communities and then what's this inertia one? Oh, let's do inertia.
42:56
Okay, so you This was you you you talk a lot.
43:02
Uh that's no surprise, but every once in a while you say something that's pretty profound.
43:05
One of the profound things that you said it stuck with me.
43:07
This was in 2021, March of 2021.
43:12
You had this episode uh where you It's just called inertia, I believe.
43:15
And you said um inertia explains like uh inertia explains why 90% of people are doing what they're doing.
43:22
In my life, I've had moments where I realized inertia is a [ __ ] Inertia is the reason why I'm doing these things, not because not actually because I want to, but because of inertia.
43:31
And often times I've got to check myself and ask myself am I really doing the right things?
43:35
And I think that you were referring to a business that you had previously sold where it wasn't doing that well and you're like, "Do I even believe this is a big opportunity?
43:44
Would I even be doing this if I weren't already doing it?
43:47
Would I have hired these same people?
43:49
Would I work with these same people?"
43:50
The answer uh at the time was hell no, and that's when you decided to get out.
43:54
So, my question is A no question, comment. That was good.
43:58
That was a really good insight.
43:58
But question number two you've since sold a business.
44:02
So, you started and sold a business, I think, post this comment. Yep.
44:09
Do you still use Like, you still think about inertia? All the time.
44:12
And by the way, this This came to me about inertia. Yeah.
44:17
It's like the Roman Empire for some guys, for me it's inertia.
44:20
Um This happened because I had a come-to-Jesus moment.
44:22
I Uh I was with our buddy Suli, and we went to We used to go in San Francisco, if you drive like 30 minutes down uh south out of San Francisco, there's these like casinos that are like half casinos. Yeah. So, we go down there.
44:38
And uh we're hanging out, we're playing, we're having a good time.
44:40
At the end of the night, he's like um He's like, "So, why you He's like, "So, I don't get what you're doing." And I go, like, "Casino?
44:49
What are you talking about?"
44:51
He's like, "No, no, no, this whole thing you were doing" cuz I was at Monkey Inferno at the time.
44:53
And to the outside, what I was doing was the greatest job ever.
44:59
If anybody had ever seen You've seen our office at Monkey Inferno.
45:01
It was literally the nicest office you have ever been to in your life.
45:04
I called it a billionaire's playground is what it was. And that's what it was.
45:08
And he literally built his A billionaire literally built his dream office.
45:10
And we just got to use it.
45:12
There's a chef every day, and there's a gym, and there's a But, it's like for only the 15 people that we were there that year. There was a small group.
45:18
20 or 15 You had 20 or 15 engineers who were paid really nicely, and you could just do whatever you want.
45:22
And the job was, "Sean, you get to come up with any idea you want.
45:25
Here's a team of super talented engineers to build them and designers. Here's the funding.
45:30
You never have to go raise funding.
45:34
You You get paid salary, and you own the equity.
45:35
Um You can By the way, you don't only want to do You don't want to focus on one?
45:39
Go ahead, do four at a time. Build four at a time.
45:41
You have enough resources.
45:42
Go ahead, do everything, right?
45:43
And I'm 25 years old when he uh 24 years old when he names me CEO.
45:46
And at 24, that was the greatest opportunity, the greatest experience ever.
45:52
At 25, incredible opportunity.
45:57
Then I was 29, and I was still doing the same thing, except for now the pressure of like succeeding like at the beginning it was like, "Dude, this is going to be awesome.
46:07
We're going to We have so many shots on goal. We're going to do it."
46:10
And we took a lot of shots on goal.
46:11
And we made some good things happen, but no big huge win, which is what we were all going for.
46:15
And by the end we were really trying to like force a square peg into a round hole. It just wasn't working.
46:21
But our mandate was like build the next Twitter, build the next Snapchat.
46:24
It's like, "Dude, that's really [ __ ] hard to do."
46:26
But like, "Okay, we're going to keep trying."
46:29
And so I got this talented team in this beautiful office. I'm CEO. I'm getting paid well. I got equity.
46:36
I got everything you would want.
46:38
And here is my best friend, the guy I looked up to saying "What the hell are you doing?"
46:43
And I was like, he's looking at me like I'm a junkie.
46:44
Like, "Dude, what are you doing with your life?"
46:45
And I'm like, "What are you talking about? This is amazing.
46:48
Of course this is amazing, right?"
46:49
And he's like, me how much money you made back then, and I think it was like low six figures.
46:54
Like over It was over $100,000, but less than $200,000.
46:56
And I remember when you told me that, I was like, like $160,000 at the time. Yeah.
46:58
I was like, "That's the most money of anyone I know. Like you have $100,000?" Like that It was huge.
47:05
I remember you told me that that amount, and I was like, "You're so rich." to me, too.
47:08
I was like, "This is amazing."
47:09
Then And then I was like, "And if any of these ideas hit, this is great."
47:13
So he He's talking to me, he's just like, "I feel He's like, "I feel like you're just doing the same thing over and over again, and not getting the result you want."
47:20
And I was like, he's He basically asked me a very simple question.
47:22
He's like, you know, um "If you weren't already working on this project, if I just took the project away I If tomorrow this whole company had to fold cuz oh, they forgot to pay their bills and whatever, this folded.
47:36
Tomorrow, would you pick up the phone?
47:38
Would you call these same people and say, 'Hey, we're still doing this idea, right?'
47:42
That's the biggest idea we could possibly think of. It's the one we must do.
47:47
Would you call these same people to work on the same idea?"
47:49
And my answer was, "Yes, the same people.
47:51
Hell no, not the same idea."
47:54
He's like, He's like And I And I was like, "That's kind of a shitty realization to have.
47:59
It's like I was like, am I an idiot? And he's like, no.
48:02
He's like, this is common.
48:03
He's like, inertia is a [ __ ] He's like, almost all of us are just doing what we're doing because we were already doing it.
48:09
And like this this even happens with investments.
48:11
After we got acquired, I got a bunch of Amazon stock.
48:14
And so my portfolio was like super skewed towards Amazon.
48:18
I was you know, all of a sudden, here's millions of dollars of Amazon stock. Okay.
48:23
If I If you'd just given me the millions of dollars, I wouldn't have put all of it into Amazon only.
48:28
But because it was already there, I was like, should I sell Amazon?
48:30
I don't know, it's a good company. Right?
48:31
It's like because it was already there, my decision was totally different than if I had just re-underwritten the the decision from scratch saying if I if I just had this money today, is this exactly how I would allocate it?
48:43
It The same thing happens in your portfolio as happens in the time of your life.
48:47
Like would I would I allocate my energy and my talents to this project?
48:50
Or am I just doing it cuz I've been doing it?
48:52
Am I just doing it cuz that's what I'm already doing?
48:55
And I think the sad answer is that for most people, they're doing what they're doing cuz they were already doing it.
49:00
It's not the thing that if they had a blank slate today, they would just go back and recreate this.
49:04
That's the same argument my wife gave to me about selling HubSpot stock.
49:08
I've not sold any and she was like, well, would you buy this stock anyway?
49:11
My argument was well, first of all, I I do like the company, but do I like it enough to have that much of my portfolio in it?
49:16
I I don't know, but my argument is like, well, but I don't want to pay taxes.
49:21
And frankly, I'm not sure if that's a good argument or not.
49:25
Um but I I am a victim of it as well.
49:29
Yeah, you know, of course.
49:29
There's a right, there's nuances to some of these things, but like that same principle just applies to a lot of parts of your life.
49:35
A lot of people are in relationships they don't want to be in because they're already in the relationship.
49:38
They're in jobs they don't want to be in because they're they're in it.
49:41
And uh and I just kind of had this like it was 2:00 a. m.
49:43
and I'm in this Chinese casino and my friend is telling me this thing and I remember we drove to our office a badge in at like 2:30 in the morning.
49:51
We go to the whiteboard and we say, "We're going to spend the next hour trying to figure out if we can actually make this company work.
49:55
And if at the end of this hour we don't look at a plan on this whiteboard that we feel is like this is going to work like I believe that this is worth a shot, then I'm going to sell this company like tomorrow.
50:06
I'm just going to get out of this company."
50:07
And then at the end of that hour we looked at it and we were like, "This is I mean these are all just like random long shots that like we can't sit here and say we have a ton of conviction in."
50:17
And then like the next day I talked to Arman and I started to say that I think it's time to to shake it up like I need to shake up something in my life. This is all beautiful. This is amazing.
50:25
I can't believe you gave me this experience, but like I don't want this anymore.
50:29
Let's either sell the company or you should replace me or something.
50:32
Something's got to change.
50:32
I can't unhear what I heard last night.
50:34
And uh I have a lot of flaws, but the one good thing I have is that once I hear the truth, I just act on it.
50:43
Like I just agree that like I've heard the truth now and that's it.
50:46
There's no going back from that.
50:46
Uh whereas I think some people will see or hear the truth and then they'll go into denial or they'll delay.
50:51
And I don't do denial or delay. That's a good one.
50:53
Um yeah, I always um I thought that that line inertia's a [ __ ] I I remember that one, so I had to bring that one up.
51:03
Um maybe the last one is paid communities.
51:05
So I've been interested There's a If you listen closely over the last 550 episodes, there's like two to three things that I've like have been obsessed about and I knew I was going to act on one of them. I acted on one of them. It's a paid community.
51:18
So By the way, can you say the two or three?
51:20
What are the What would What would be the two or three?
51:23
I I uh helping people find jobs. So I call it job boards.
51:28
It's beyond that, but I've always been fascinated by that.
51:31
Um and then creating um like um somewhat related, but I was I've always been fascinated by the trucking industry or other like blue-collar essential jobs that aren't don't have a lot of technology or software in order to help them be more efficient.
51:44
Um so the those are like two or three things that I've always really liked.
51:48
And then of course B2B media companies and database and research businesses.
51:53
Um, but the other one that I really loved was paid communities.
51:54
And if you listen closely, starting in 2020, I did a lot of breakdowns on different paid communities.
52:01
So I mentioned Tiger 21, Vistage, which uh has since sold.
52:03
So I I talked about Vistage.
52:05
A lot of people didn't know what Vistage is.
52:06
It's like um similar to what Hampton does.
52:08
It's it's similar to what YPO does, but the target market is uh CEOs and business owners of plumbing companies uh in the in middle of America.
52:16
Doesn't sound that huge, but it has since sold for about $1.
52:21
8 billion, I think about 8 or 10 months ago.
52:22
I think about 8 or 10 months ago.
52:23
It was doing and now it's doing close to $500 million a year in sales, very profitable.
52:28
And so I talked about paid communities and I talked about Tiger 21 and a few other ones.
52:32
Here's the I I I made a list of pros and cons back in 2020. So this was March 2020.
52:38
And I'll tell you if I think the pros and cons are true since I've now run Hampton for about 1 year.
52:41
So pros of paid paid communities. They can grow quickly.
52:46
They seem fun to run if you're interested in the topic.
52:48
You don't need a lot of money to start them.
52:50
They definitely seem profitable.
52:52
Um, and then the cons were uh a lot of times they don't scale that well.
52:57
I think churn could be pretty pretty high.
53:02
Uh, and those were like my two main cons.
53:04
So the truth is is that they can grow quickly, but you don't want them to grow quick quickly.
53:09
You want them to grow slowly.
53:11
So I was a little bit wrong about that.
53:12
Can you start them with zero money? $0? Yes.
53:14
I started Hampton with no money.
53:18
Uh, we didn't even buy a website or domain name.
53:21
Um, can they be very profitable? Yes.
53:24
The answer is yes, they can.
53:24
Um, what I got wrong or didn't mention was how meticulous you have to be about growth.
53:30
And they can get big, but they just take longer.
53:33
And that's okay because I think if they take long Usually, not always, if something takes longer to grow, maybe that means that it's going to die is it has it's less likely to die quickly. Example, Thera sios.
53:44
Grew quickly, probably is going to die very quickly.
53:48
There's a lot of examples of that.
53:48
And so, it has in fact proven to be a big business, or it can be a big business.
53:55
It's harder to grow than I thought, but not because of demand, but because you don't want it to grow quickly.
53:59
You need it to grow slowly, and to be really thoughtful.
54:02
So, I underestimated how challenging that is.
54:05
Um but I did a lot of the work in front of people.
54:07
I I I would have thought that someone was going to launch this.
54:09
I even interviewed The funny thing is the funny thing is you you invited a couple of other paid community CEOs on the pod as guests, ask them 100 questions, and then took their lunch.
54:21
And I just find that to be an incredible story that I look forward to telling as this plays out. I I need it to work.
54:28
Uh I need it to work first.
54:30
At the time, you had a community called Club LTV, which was an e-com community.
54:34
I I think it was making $100,000 a month pretty much right away.
54:39
I think you actually That name is wonderful. It was It was free. I didn't charge for it.
54:43
Um but it was like invite only.
54:43
Like I Basically, that was I was running an e-commerce business, but I'm part-time in it.
54:51
And I've never done e-commerce before.
54:55
And so, I have a strategy of like if I'm going to do something that I don't know how to do, there are hacks to learn faster.
55:01
One of the hacks is surround yourself with other people who are doing that playing the same game at one to two levels above where you're playing it.
55:09
Meaning, they're one to two notches better at it than you are, and further along than you are.
55:15
And so, when we wanted to grow big on on Twitter, I think both of us had a similar idea.
55:18
We created a group a text message group called the 100K Club.
55:20
And we invited six people who all had that same goal, and then we all talked in there about initially like stuff we were doing to make that happen, then we all just became friends.
55:30
But like immersion into a small club of people who play the same are playing the same game at a one or two notch higher level than you is one of the one of the hacks to get better at something faster.
55:43
And so Club 11:00 TV was cool, if I just create a curated group of awesome e-commerce owners, I'm going to learn a bunch of [ __ ] that I need to know to make my own things successful.
55:53
So I'm not even charging these people um because I don't need to make money off this. I want the information.
55:58
I actually wanted the network from it and that's exactly what I got out of it.
56:02
But you made money through advertising. Yeah, we had sponsors.
56:04
And that model actually works.
56:07
So there was a company called Aventa who does this, but they did it with like chief information officers.
56:11
So these are like Fortune 500 and they were making um they they sold for 17 times profit for $250 million.
56:16
So they were making I think 50 million in revenue and then whatever that profit is, I can't do that math.
56:22
Um but they so so that model that you had, it works.
56:26
The downside, which I don't think you you knew getting into it, logistically, there is a it's it's a very operationally heavy business.
56:34
It's very very challenging.
56:34
Uh it's not e-e-com is also operationally heavy, but it's more so like there's like three or four things that you have to nail.
56:41
With people, there's like way more things.
56:43
There's like people's feelings that you have to like account for and it's a little bit more of an art and it's actually quite challenging to hire uh help for that type of business.
56:51
But you were onto something and I actually think Club 11:00 TV I think one was a business that could have totally worked.
56:56
Uh me and Ben and I we just had a conversation like, "Hey, do we want to actually turn this into a business?
57:00
It can, it'll work, it would be profitable."
57:02
We just saw better opportunities for ourselves.
57:05
Uh but like that's one where if I knew the right person, I would have totally just handed over Club 11:00 TV Club 11:00 TV and be like, "You're the operator of this now.
57:13
Uh there's a clear path to make this a business.
57:15
There's like one called e-commerce fuel that's out there that's kind of Which I love. older version of this. subscriber. Really? Why?
57:22
Why you didn't do e-commerce?
57:26
I just thought it was awesome.
57:26
Uh Andrew, the guy who started it, I used to read his blog and I thought it It sick.
57:30
It was $300 a year, I think. He listens to the pod.
57:31
I I and I talked to him every once in a while.
57:33
I just thought it was cool.
57:34
I thought e-commerce fuel was great.
57:34
In fact, I was a paying member in Moiz Ali, a very rich, successful guy. Sorry, Moiz.
57:42
I'm going to blow your cover.
57:43
He used to use my account cuz he didn't want to pay $300 a year to He would He would use my We would share a password.
57:52
So, like it's pretty funny.
57:52
But, I liked e-commerce fuel. I thought it was great.
57:55
It's still a thing and he limits it to 3,000 people, I think, right?
57:57
So, uh something like that.
57:59
I don't I don't I I don't actually use it cuz it's a forum and I don't really love like forums and there's like live events or whatever.
58:04
I I like the way we did it with Club 11:11.
58:07
I thought that was more more fun and easier just easier to to like actually participate in.
58:11
Um So, anyways, I thought that Yeah, that that definitely could have been a business.
58:16
Uh just, you know, you got to pick and choose opportunities.
58:18
So, long story short, uh What What do you think is the What's your takeaway from this?
58:24
So, like what do you Okay, we made a bunch of bunch of predictions.
58:26
We go back, we look, we see what we were right about, what we were wrong about.
58:29
What's your to the Chris Farley question that I love, what's the right lesson to learn out of this?
58:37
The right lesson to learn, there's a few.
58:38
The number one is we we make money talking about this stuff. And that's great.
58:44
You could say we make a great living doing that.
58:49
I feel like a puss for not acting on some of these things.
58:51
I guess I acted on one, but like there's been five or 10 or 20 things where you've told me and I'm like, "That's cool. I should go in on that."
59:00
Mainly, there's only been three things that I've gone in on, which is TRT, but like [ __ ] we talked about Open AI.
59:04
Like I We should have put our money I think you have in a few cases, but I should have put my money where my mouth was a little bit more.
59:10
So, that's one lesson, which is predictions aren't that easy or aren't that terribly hard.
59:15
Having the courage in them is hard.
59:19
Uh mine is the exact same thing, which is that the predictions that matter are the ones where you notice something early before everybody notices it.
59:27
But then you have like that's, you know, it is kind of cliche, right?
59:32
Ideas are kind of cheap and execute everything.
59:35
No, no, the idea is actually quite valuable.
59:36
However, it's potential energy.
59:38
You got to turn the potential energy into kinetic energy. How do you do that?
59:41
Through like motion, right?
59:41
So it's like chasing it down and actually doing something with it is um is where all the value gets created.
59:50
And me and Ben have actually figured out a little bit of a better way to do this both through like actually having like vehicles to invest in these things, but also we just continually stop and ask ourselves like I think in the last 6 months there's probably been two or three times where we say what's the thing that we see right now that three, four, you know, 3 years from now we're going to be like dude, we talked about that.
1:00:10
That was in front of our face.
1:00:11
So why didn't we just go and meet the guy?
1:00:13
Why didn't we go and invest in the thing? Why didn't we start one? Whatever it is, right?
1:00:16
And so by asking that question regularly, like what's the thing that's actually hidden in plain sight right now for us, um I think I'm going to like turn that dial from like uh missing a bunch of these opportunities to taking advantage of them.
1:00:33
We should do a whole episode on what those things are. Yeah. Yeah, I will.
1:00:36
I'll tell you the way I learned that, by the way, was I met this guy on a Mitra.
1:00:39
And Anamitra came to my office and he was the first product manager at Twitter.
1:00:43
And I was like tell me what it was like back then.
1:00:45
He's like, "Well, there was like, I don't know, 12 people in the company.
1:00:49
Uh I join uh you know, 15 people, something like that.
1:00:51
I join and I was like, was it obvious at the time that like Twitter was going to become Twitter?"
1:00:55
He's like, "No, no, no, not at all.
1:00:56
Like Twitter was kind of interesting, but looked pretty frivolous and useless.
1:01:02
People were texting out like what they were eating.
1:01:04
There was no app at the time.
1:01:07
It was just you just texted this number, like 444444 or whatever, like whatever you had for lunch.
1:01:11
And in Silicon Valley, people were like kind of having fun with it a little bit, but it didn't seem like a serious like He's like, "I had like job offers from Microsoft or whatever.
1:01:19
Like I I serious opportunities, and then here was this like Twitter thing.
1:01:22
Even the name sounded frivolous.
1:01:26
And he's like um but I had learned one important lesson which is that whenever you see like a phenomenon of behavior.
1:01:32
Meaning you see people acting in a way that seems strange, weird, or inexplicable, or irrational.
1:01:40
The natural reaction is to just write it off be like, I don't know, those are weirdos.
1:01:44
And that that makes no sense. Idiots. And move on.
1:01:49
And he's like, what I've learned is he's a VC.
1:01:51
He's like, as a VC and as at the time and he's like, thank god in my career I realized that which was when you realize when you see that weird behavior that you don't understand the thing is not to the thing not to do is label it and write it off is to lean in and try to understand it.
1:02:04
He's like, so I saw that people were like like, why would you text out what you're eating right now? Like, what do you why?
1:02:12
And why do why do you like to see what other people are saying in that same way?
1:02:15
Like that seems completely like strange behavior but people are doing it.
1:02:18
He's like, anytime you see strange behavior and people doing it like that's usually the the inner that's what a amazing opportunity actually looks like.
1:02:29
And since he told me that I then saw that many times over.
1:02:31
Like, we got acquired by Twitch.
1:02:33
I remember in college walking into my the dorm room the guy next to me who who lived next to me and he was watching a like a replay of someone playing a StarCraft tournament.
1:02:44
And I was like, you are king dork.
1:02:44
Not only is StarCraft on your screen right now, you are not even playing.
1:02:49
You are watching some guy in Korea play this game.
1:02:55
That is literally like the dorkiest dumbest thing.
1:02:57
I didn't and I literally made fun of him for like a year.
1:03:01
Later when we got acquired and he's like, oh, you're head of esports at Twitch now.
1:03:05
He was like he literally was like, you [ __ ] He called me and he was like, you you used to used to make fun of me for this.
1:03:12
And I was like, dude, I agree.
1:03:13
I was totally dumb and wrong.
1:03:16
I should have been like I don't even play games, but I watch people on YouTube playing.
1:03:21
Yeah, and I was like, I should have leaned in.
1:03:22
Why would somebody do this behavior that seems completely irrational?
1:03:25
Why would somebody watch someone else play video games on the other side of the earth through this replay that he had to download at the time?
1:03:31
There was no Twitch at the time.
1:03:32
It's like he had to download this thing off the server for 8 hours and then watch it at night. And I was like, "Weird.
1:03:38
I don't want to hear it."
1:03:38
And then, of course, you know, so missing that five times has taught me like lean into that Like and I just remembered The OpenAI example, by the way.
1:03:48
Sam Altman, president of YC, right?
1:03:51
He is He had the best job in Silicon Valley.
1:03:53
President of YC was the best job of Silicon in Silicon Valley at the time.
1:03:57
YC is probably the most like value-generative company at the time or like organization. He's the president.
1:04:04
He got picked over anybody else.
1:04:06
And he left to go join an AI nonprofit. I was like, what?
1:04:11
Yeah, you're like something something's up.
1:04:12
And these billionaires are putting $100 million into this AI research company, this nonprofit. Why would they do that?
1:04:18
And again, I was just like, "Weird.
1:04:20
Sam may doing a weird inexplicable thing."
1:04:23
Instead, I should have been like, "Hey, the smartest guy in Silicon Valley just left the most prestigious job in Silicon Valley to do this thing that sounds sort of like strange to me. Lean in."
1:04:31
And yeah, that's the lesson I would share at my takeaway of this whole thing.
1:04:35
Let me wrap up with one quick thing.
1:04:37
I forgot I should have said this earlier, but we did this episode about this guy. I think he was in India.
1:04:44
And we called him in and he like talked to us without his video on.
1:04:50
And I found him because he had this website called Uber Pro.
1:04:54
I think it was called Uber. pro.
1:04:58
And I've Googled his name last I Googled his name last night.
1:05:00
I can't find him anywhere online. Oh, he's gone.
1:05:01
I can't find him anywhere.
1:05:04
And if anyone can find him, please do this. This would be amazing.
1:05:07
I want to see what he's up to now.
1:05:08
He was 23 years old or even younger.
1:05:11
And what I did was I gave him $1,000 and he gave me $10,000 in Uber credit.
1:05:18
And for like years, I took an Uber Black everywhere because what he did was I think this is how it worked.
1:05:26
What he did was he found all of these Indian kids that were like in his town and when you rode Uber for the very first time and you referred people, you got $25 in free credit.
1:05:35
And somehow he made it so he could convince all these kids to take a free Uber to get $25 in credit and to continually refer themselves.
1:05:45
I also think he ranked really high on Google for Uber discount code or Uber promo code.
1:05:50
And he so he accumulated millions of dollars of Uber credit and you could buy the Uber credit from him for 10 cents or 20 cents on the dollar.
1:06:02
And I found this website and I was like, "I'm doing this."
1:06:04
And I bought I think $1,000 worth of Uber credit.
1:06:06
And I and then you have to change your iPhone from America to Moldova.
1:06:10
Your Uber account has to be in Moldova.
1:06:13
And that was this loophole.
1:06:15
And he was making a lot of money doing it.
1:06:17
For an Indian a guy in India, he was making thousands of dollars a month, which I think in the party is like, "Yeah, this is so much money."
1:06:23
I think he was making 30 grand a month.
1:06:25
And I always I've always wondered, "What is that kid up to?"
1:06:27
I wanted to know where where him on. He was fascinating.
1:06:30
He was He was fascinating.
1:06:32
That was a great arbitrage that the guy uh you know, had architected for himself.
1:06:36
Very I don't know if it's illegal, but definitely against the rules, questionably unethical, but when you see things like that, they're going somewhere.
1:06:43
And I've always wanted to know what happened to that guy.
1:06:44
I want to leave you with two of the kind of You know what I talked about like "Why am I hearing about this three times? Don't just ignore this."
1:06:52
Like, "I'm training my brain to not ignore these signals now."
1:06:56
I'll give you two of them.
1:06:58
For people who made it this far in the episode, these are the gem This is the gem now.
1:07:02
Uh this is the part where you're like, "Holy [ __ ] I can't believe they saved this for the end."
1:07:04
Which is basically the two trends that I see right now that are strangely big. Go to Go to character. ai.
1:07:16
And pull up how much traffic you see that that website has. Oh my god.
1:07:20
I would have thought like 10,000 a month.
1:07:24
And what's the real number? Oh my god. So 200 million. Exactly. 200 180 million. What?
1:07:34
This Like you could go to the Wall Street Journal, it won't have 200 million.
1:07:37
You could go to New York Times, not going to have 200 million. This is No. No media site has that.
1:07:41
And it has an average visit duration of 33 minutes. It's beta. character. ai.
1:07:45
Okay, so I've been on this for a while.
1:07:47
I've been talking about I've been talking about AI and I've been talking about like OnlyFans and this like kind of sometimes the crossover between AI and like this like AI OnlyFans thing and I'm looking at investment opportunities in the space.
1:08:00
There are so many companies that are doing this like chat with a AI type of thing.
1:08:07
Replika, character AI, whatever.
1:08:09
I never thought that would be a thing.
1:08:11
They all have ludicrous traffic. We called it by the way.
1:08:13
We talked about Replika like a year ago. Um Girlfriends.
1:08:15
AI virtual girlfriends, exactly.
1:08:18
And that's a lot of that's a lot of how people use this character AI thing.
1:08:21
Like they kind of chat with uh yeah, the chat I think goes into the gray area a little bit.
1:08:26
Um I mean it's a lot of like smart people like Einstein.
1:08:31
But it But the the top person is Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish.
1:08:33
And then like some K-pop lady.
1:08:36
Like there's probably a a weird thing going on as well.
1:08:40
willing to chat with AI for a really long time, so easy to write off as weird, loser, but it's it's my friend watching StarCraft tournaments in the room next door, right? Dork king dork behavior.
1:08:52
I will not make that mistake again.
1:08:52
This is def- This is definitely something.
1:08:55
I don't think that these companies necessarily are the winners, but like, you know, every every product there's a kind of like the wave of attempts, wave two of attempts, wave three, and then finally there's like the last mover, right?
1:09:05
The the last mover who actually nails it and builds a full-on product around this.
1:09:08
And so, there's something in this space that's like ranges from companionship to naughty chat that like with AI that's going to be massive cuz the numbers are off the charts.
1:09:20
The behavior of this strange thing is off the charts. Okay, that's one.
1:09:23
Second one, which is less crazy, is um there's a bunch of really smart people that are now have a new business strategy.
1:09:32
And their business strategy is to buy wounded unicorns.
1:09:36
And so, heard it once, heard it twice, heard it three times.
1:09:38
First heard this from Andrew Wilkinson.
1:09:40
Andrew Wilkinson, he he called me back a couple of years ago.
1:09:43
I was living in my old house in San Francisco.
1:09:45
And he I remember him telling me, "You know what I would do if I was you?
1:09:47
Is I would find one of these uh startups that's raised venture capital, but it's not going to become a billion-dollar company, but they got to 5 million in revenue, 10 million in revenue.
1:09:58
And you could buy these for cheap because they don't have it they can't raise their next round, and there's no way out.
1:10:03
And so, there's not really like a a good exit market for that group.
1:10:07
And those people don't want to like fire a bunch of the engineers, stop paying high prices for their San Francisco office space, and like become profitable.
1:10:16
They could in theory, but they're just not going to eat [ __ ] in order to do that.
1:10:19
They're just going to shut it down, return investor money, sell the assets to whoever, and they're going to go start their next company or go get a job." He told me that first.
1:10:27
He had then done that with a company called Meteor.
1:10:29
So, Meteor was this developer framework, and I think he bought a company that was doing like 5 to 7 million It was doing like 5 million plus in revenue for like one X revenue or less. I don't know. I don't know.
1:10:41
It was like some like ignore the multiple of the exact multiple.
1:10:44
They I think they I think they I think they raised $30 million or something like that.
1:10:48
They had raised a bunch of money. It had customers.
1:10:49
It had revenue, but it just wasn't going to be the next big thing, which is venture capital is called become the next big thing or bust.
1:10:56
And what he realized was if they bust, we can pick some of these assets up. So, Andrew had said it.
1:11:03
Then, um, you hear other people that are talking about this that are doing this.
1:11:06
Our friends Xavier and Sieva.
1:11:06
They're doing this right now.
1:11:08
If you're driving to San Francisco, there is a billboard with with their company that says like whatever like there's never too late for a second chance or something.
1:11:19
It looks like honestly, it looks like a divorce lawyer cuz it's KJ with her arms crossed and it says like, um, you know, there's always, uh, you know, there's always a second chance or something like that.
1:11:29
And I don't know what They have a billboard They have a billboard entering San Francisco.
1:11:34
You know like when you come in on whatever the 101, it's like, um, uh, it's right there and it's basically saying, you know, like don't just shut down your company, sell it to us. So, they're doing this.
1:11:44
Jeremy Giffin is like he came on Invest Like the Best and he was like, yeah, I think one of the big opportunities right now is to do this.
1:11:52
You hear this four or five times from smart people.
1:11:56
Like, you got to be an idiot to not realize that there's probably something there.
1:11:59
And it's like it's not you're hearing it from the news.
1:12:02
Like you got to know where you're hearing it from.
1:12:05
You're not hearing it from the news or like the hype cycle type of things.
1:12:07
It's like you hear smart people mention these things in kind of passing or these opportunities, but it's not consensus yet.
1:12:14
And you realize like, oh, that's probably one of these like what I call like, you know, value spots or fat pitches.
1:12:18
So, like, what are the big fat pitches that you could go swing at?
1:12:21
You don't have to go swing at it.
1:12:22
But like you should identify that at any given time there's like a couple of fat pitch opportunities that you could be going for. That's one of them.
1:12:31
I want to learn more about it.
1:12:31
I want to How do you find I mean, I want to know I've got questions like how do you find them? Things like that. hand, bro.
1:12:36
Don't don't even don't even think about it.
1:12:37
Just keep running hand in hand.
1:12:39
You already got your fat pitch.
1:12:41
Well, um, By the way, love saying fat pitch, by the way.
1:12:44
Just a fun fun phrase to say. Yeah, I agree. Uh, that is a good one. It's a good one.
1:12:50
Where did you steal that from? Teddy Williams? Warren Buffett.
1:12:54
Who stole it from Ted Williams? Who knows? I know.
1:12:58
I I He said it in his biography. I know. Hard to say.
1:13:07
No, it's I said it very easily.
1:13:07
Um all right, that's the pod.