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One thing that I'll think anybody really talks about, it's kind of touchy-feely, but every single successful person I know has a story like this. All right, Sam.
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I want to do a short episode that is about one specific topic, believers.
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So, a lot of founders I know are interested in getting investors, getting advisors.
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I'm sure you get hit up a lot in your email for either, "Hey, will you invest in this?
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Will you advise in this?"
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So, I think everybody needs somebody in their career, usually in your early 20s, that believes in you more than you believe in yourself at the time.
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They they just have an irrational belief.
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You're a penny stock, but they see you as a blue chip.
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And they want to buy up all your stock.
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And they do that by spending time with you, by spending effort with you, sometimes investing you, sometimes advising you.
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But it's not the advice, it's not the money that actually now in hindsight, when you look back, is what mattered.
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The thing that really mattered was this person believed in you more than you believed in yourself at the time.
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They almost trick you into believing in yourself or to just going for it and overcoming that initial like hesitation or doubts to just get going to where finally your evidence will start to catch up.
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And eventually you're fueled by your evidence and you're fueled by, you know, your your own self-belief.
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But it's like jumping jump-starting a car.
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There's people in your life who do that.
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I've you know, I have never talked to you about this.
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I I know a couple of people in my life that did this.
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I want to hear did Did you have this?
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I had this with a couple people. First of all, my wife.
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I felt like she was like doing the same thing when I met her.
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She was like picking stocks.
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She picked a good one, I I hope. Yeah, I had two.
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The first one was Scott Belsky.
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So, Scott Belsky currently is the chief product officer of Adobe, soon to be CEO, I think.
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And he's probably a billionaire because he's has started and sold a bunch of companies.
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And I cold emailed him when I first started my company the Hustle asking him to invest. And he said no.
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And then about six or eight weeks later, he was on our daily email, and I got an email from him in particular when I was having a horrible day, and he goes, "These emails are just so good. I have to join."
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And he gave me like $15,000 or something like that.
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And I only met with Scott in person one time cuz Scott has always been He was a big deal back then.
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He's an even big bigger deal bigger deal now.
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And he had one meeting with me where he taught me I had never heard the word steward. You know steward?
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Like you are a steward of this capital.
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You are a steward of the brand.
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And he gave me this pump up talk, and he's like, "You are so like I could tell you were going to be a steward of the Hustle and a steward of my money and everyone else's money, your customers. You have this."
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And And I remember thinking it changed my life, the fact that Scott [ __ ] Belsky believed in me.
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And he used this word steward. I was so into it.
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The second person was Tim Ferriss.
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So, I have told the story before, but basically I met Tim Ferriss because he lived near me in San Francisco, and we would walk our dogs at the same time and just talk about neighborhood stuff.
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Well, a few weeks after we first started talking, I get an email from Tim saying, "Hey, I know what the Hustle is. It looks really cool.
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Could we meet and get dinner?
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And I can ask you a little bit about email cuz I want to start a newsletter."
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And I was like, "Yeah, sure. Let's do it, man."
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And so, we go out to dinner in our neighborhood, and I get down to sit at dinner, and he goes, "Oh, you are the dog owner's guy? You are the same guy?"
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And I was like, "Yeah, man. What's going on?"
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Because I never told him what I did for work when we would walk our dogs together cuz I wanted him to think I didn't want to bother him cuz he was like a celebrity to me, and I didn't want to ruin that relationship.
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And it was awesome the fact that this guy wanted to meet with me, and I He was like, "What you guys are doing is so smart, so innovative."
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And I was like, "It's not that interesting." He's like, "No, it is."
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And he like bought into me, and he believed in me, and that was such a big deal to me that he gave me the time of day. Just even just a dinner.
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It was like game-changing where I was like, "I'm the man. I'm the man. I'm the best.
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Like there is no one better than me."
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And I had that like energy because of those two meetings.
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And was it just like a temporary high that that fades, you know, 30 minutes later, or do you feel like that planted some kind of seed in you?
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It planted a seed because then I would look at Scott and Tim's other endeavors.
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You know, they did some amazing stuff. And it felt good.
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You know how when you go to a website and you see someone who puts your logo on their website to brag that they use you. You go to like hubspot.
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com and like Nike it says like Nike uses and I felt so much gratitude that I was one of the logos on their websites.
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And I remember like thinking that.
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I'm like, look, like this person picks a bunch of winners and I happen to be part of this basket. I I feel honored.
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And so I would use that for a long time of like go to his Crunchbase profile.
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He lists the Hustle as an investment.
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I remember thinking like I was so special and I used that for fuel for a long time.
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Dude, that's a that's a great story.
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Have you done that for anyone else, do you think?
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Yeah, look, you and I have done it together on this podcast when we call people out.
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And I think like for example, Michael from Our Future.
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This kid who was probably 20 years old when he cold emailed me you and I to make videos for us and we loved his energy.
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But I think that like you and I both bought into him a little bit.
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We're like, your energy's so good.
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Or same with Dylan and Henry.
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Yeah, I think you and I have done it together.
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Who bought in Who bought yours?
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So, I'll give you three quick quick examples.
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The first one is a woman named Lisa Keister.
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Lisa Keister is a professor at Duke where she was at the time.
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I have no idea what she's doing now.
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It's a good reminder to to look her up and drop her a note.
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I took a class my last year at Duke. I was a pre-med student. I had taken the MCAT.
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I was ready to go to med school.
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In my my last semester I said, I should take a class with my two best friends.
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Like, we've never Crazy, we're friends through college. We live together.
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We've never taken a class together.
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And we decided, let's take the easiest class we can.
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I was so burnt out from studying for the MCAT.
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I just wanted something that was the easiest class.
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So, we looked it up on rate my professor.
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com and it was like the easiest class is a class called getting rich. Sounds good. Good good title.
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And she was just click baiting us.
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Like it was a personal finance and entrepreneurship class, but getting rich sounds a lot better.
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And she was a woman who she had a crazy story.
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She graduated from Duke with a degree in Mandarin cuz that's what she was interested in.
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She just followed what she was interested in.
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And she told us she's like I remember at the time feeling completely clueless what the hell I'm supposed to do with my life cuz all my friends were going to law school, banking, whatever.
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I didn't want to do those, but it just felt like school was just giant like pipe that just dumped you out in New York or LA or San Francisco in one of these tracks.
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And I wasn't on one of the tracks and I felt bad about myself and I realized you know, people are like what the hell are you going to do with this Mandarin degree? Good luck with that.
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And she's like I bet I can figure something out in China.
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So she just moves to China one way ticket.
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Ends up building a great business there connecting Chinese companies with American companies cuz she spoke both languages.
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Anyway, she got super rich in the process, retires by 30, comes back to Duke to teach.
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And so the reason she bet on me or believed in me early was she was not an investor.
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She really wasn't even an advisor. She was a believer.
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We had this terrible idea to start a sushi restaurant chain.
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We were like why isn't there a Chipotle for sushi?
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And we were like we'll do it even though we had no restaurant experience or sushi experience or nothing.
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And everybody I talked to, every adult, every grown up that I looked up to was basically like restaurants equal fail.
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Doing a startup versus going to med school, I don't know man. Like are you sure?
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Like you just got accepted in. Like you should just go.
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And she was the only one who was like this sounds awesome.
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You could totally do this.
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And at the time I took that as she believes in our idea. We have a good idea.
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And I wish I could say that she believed in us, but she didn't even really know us that well.
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She was actually just such a big believer that if you just do the most interesting thing, the most exciting thing and ambitious thing for you in your life at the moment, [ __ ] works out.
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She was just a believer in the path more than even us.
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But at the time I interpreted it as she thinks we're going to win.
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She thinks this is a good idea and that this is going to work.
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And so, even false belief will work.
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It It'll fuel your engine for a while.
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Not only false belief, but just her one conversation with you, which she does not remember, and at the time she was like, "What I'm saying is not important. This is no big deal."
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And conversations like that make such a big impact every once in a while. You know what I mean?
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It's like when your kid draws something and then they show it to you and it looks horrible, but you're like, "This is awesome.
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Oh my god, did you How did you think of this?" Or like, whatever.
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Like, are those two colors that I put together cuz of this?
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And you make them feel like they're a [ __ ] artist.
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She did that for me, except I was 18 years old.
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I was 22 years old or something, 21 years old.
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And she looked at my shitty business plan and she was like, "That's awesome.
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You could totally do this." And I It fueled me.
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And so, Lisa Keyser was the first one.
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And she And it was genuine, by the way.
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There was no like BS in it.
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I I think she genuinely had that level of enthusiasm and excitement about it, and it was contagious.
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It cannot be faked when somebody's genuinely excited for you.
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All right, guys, really quick.
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So, back when I was running The Hustle, we had this premium newsletter called Trends.
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The way it worked was we hired a ton of analysts and we created this sort of playbook for researching different companies and ideas and emerging trends to help you make money and build businesses.
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Well, HubSpot did something kind of cool.
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So, they took this playbook that we developed and we gave to our analysts and they turned it into an actionable guide and a resource that anyone can download.
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And it breaks down all the different methods that we use for spotting upcoming trends, for spotting different companies that are going to explode and grow really quickly.
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It's pretty awesome that they took this internal document that we had for teaching our analysts how to do this into a tool and are giving it away for free that anyone can download.
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So, if you want to stay ahead of the game and you want to find cool business ideas or different niches that most people have no idea they exist, this is the ultimate guide.
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So, if you want to check it out, you can see the link down below in the description. Now, back to the show.
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The second person was this guy named John Prendergast.
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So, we got into some accelerator.
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You're supposed to get assigned with a mentor, which is the most fake way you can get a mentor is they get assigned to you.
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And this guy put in a request.
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He goes, "I want these guys."
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And it was because he himself, although now he was doing some fintech company, his first business was he was a franchisee of Boston Market.
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And he was like, "Oh, these guys are doing a restaurant thing? I can help them out."
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And he helped us out in two ways.
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The first was he gave us real talk.
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So, he took us into the and we came to his office and he was like, "So, what's the plan?"
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We told him the whole business plan.
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We gave him the pitch we'd practiced a million times.
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Then he goes, "Is this [ __ ] going to work or or not?"
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And just him asking us that way, like jarred me.
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And I was like, "I have no idea."
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Which is like not what you're supposed to say when you're pitching or investors or employees or anyone really.
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You're supposed to just say, "Of course it's going to work. Here's the research. Here's the studies.
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Here's why Here's the plan."
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I was like, "Dude, I have no idea."
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And he goes, "So, you probably shouldn't sign a lease for the 10, you know, that personal guarantee and a 10-year lease, right?
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If you don't know if this concept's going to work."
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He's like, "You know, so how can you figure out if the concept's going to work?"
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He just asked a better question.
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Like instead of where should we launch like what location should we go for?
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He's like, "How do you figure out if this is even worth doing if people want this?"
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And he got us thinking he got us to eventually do it like a cloud kitchen.
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And so, he helped us that way.
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But the thing he did afterwards was much more valuable.
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After we So, he he talked to us for about an hour.
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And the bad news was we were dumb.
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The good news is we knew we were dumb.
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Whereas there's a lot of 21-year-olds who are dumb, but they think they're smart.
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We had the one asset which was we thought we were pretty dumb.
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And so, when somebody told us a good idea or somebody seemed smarter than us, we actually took them up on it.
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And so, he told us to do these three things or think about these three things.
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So, we just immediately went and did those three things.
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And then 4 days later we were like, "Hey John, we did those four things. Here's what we learned.
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Here's what we're going to do next."
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And so, he was like, "These guys are great."
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Which is now that I'm in the position where sometimes I give people advice, that never happens.
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Like it seemed like the obvious thing to do, but actually that rarely ever happens.
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Rarely do people ask you a question, genuinely want the answer, then take it take good advice and and act on it and come back and say, "Here's what happened."
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They close the loop and say, "Here's what happened.
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Here's what we're going to do next."
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And so, he wrote this blog post.
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And what he said in the blog post, I don't believe was true at all at the time.
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But dude, that was like a gust of wind in our sails.
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He goes, "I met these founders and I've met a lot of founders, probably 100 founders, and I've given a lot of advice.
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These guys, they took what I said, they acted on it immediately, violently."
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And he goes, "One of the most important things for an entrepreneur is a high bias for action."
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And these guys, he named us.
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And he goes, "They have the highest bias for action of anyone I've met in the last 10 years."
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And I was like, I didn't even know that phrase.
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Kind of like you're talking about Stewart.
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Like I didn't even heard bias for action.
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That was not a phrase I'd ever heard.
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But I was like, [ __ ] put that label on my back. That's me now.
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I You know, I was a blank canvas before that. I was an empty vessel.
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And him giving me that label became kind of like calling cards.
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Like, "Yo, I don't I don't know what the right action what the right answer is.
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But I know that how I do things is I have a high bias for action.
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So, I'm just going to take a [ __ ] ton of action and I'll figure things out that way."
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And so, he gave us a real gift in that moment, which was again, not really true, but it didn't matter.
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It was true in my mind and therefore he gave me something to strive towards, which is reminds me of your your Belsky story. So, check this out.
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So, John is a an entrepreneur, I guess.
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He I think he has a podcast, too.
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I found I don't know if you want people to see this.
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I found an old Sean website that is basically your resume.
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And on your website and on this website, it has references.
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And you've got one from John.
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"I would bet on these guys in almost anything.
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They have the highest bias to action of any entrepreneurs I've met in the past few years."
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And then it links off to this blog post that he wrote about you, which is insane.
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In the blog post, he has a conversation that you guys had together, and it's pretty funny. Exactly.
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So, he is So, that was the second one, and then the third one is Michael Birch.
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Michael Birch, he was the guy who was what I wanted to be.
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He was a Silicon Valley billionaire, built multiple successful companies, was living the life, had a cool office in San Francisco.
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And I came I moved to San Francisco to work with him.
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And so, I I worked with him, and eventually he ended up promoting me.
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He was the CEO at the time.
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I was the junior guy in the company.
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I was 24 years old, probably the youngest guy in the company.
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And he actually promoted me to CEO, which is insane.
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This is, you know, like a 18-person company at the time.
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And it wasn't that he promoted me.
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It was It was the speech he gave.
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It It took me offsite, and I thought I was getting fired, cuz that's what I'd seen in movies, that they take you like out to coffee, cuz they want to like shoot you in the head out there and not cause a scene in the office. So, I I texted my mom.
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I was like, "Oh, no, he wants to meet offsite.
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Like, I'll be home for lunch. You know, it's over. I had a good run. It was fun.
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But, whatever I was doing there, I'm making it up as I went. I did something wrong."
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He sat me down, and he was with his wife, and he goes, "You know, when you meet somebody, sometimes you just know."
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And I think he's talking about his wife.
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And he goes, "I've met a lot of people in Silicon Valley.
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I know now when somebody's special, and they're going to do something special in their career."
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He goes, "You're either going to do it here or elsewhere.
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So, I'm going to give you the keys to have you do it here." And I was blown away.
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You know, it It was like a astrology reading.
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Like, it it didn't mean anything. There was no evidence. There was no logic.
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There was no explanation. No rationale.
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But, him just saying, "You're going to do something special."
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Uh you know, that [ __ ] fueled me.
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I I I then failed for like 6 years straight right after that, um which felt horrible, cuz this guy believed in me, and I just felt like I couldn't deliver this, like, you know, billion-dollar company that I was supposed to.
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But, that fueled me for a very long time.
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Dude, this, more than anything, inspires me to give these speeches to other people.
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Yeah, I'm just going to go willy-nilly, maybe.
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Everybody's getting a fortune cookie from me from now on.
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Can I just tell you one of the funnier things that I've seen this week?
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So, on Sean's This looks like Sean is like a year out of college. On Or he's 24 years old.
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On your website, which I assume is your resume, basically, you have your height and weight listed.
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So, it says Sean Porry, 24 years old, 6 ft, 167 lb of pure hustle.
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Yeah, dude, I I didn't know how to make say like twisted twisted steel is sex appeal?
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Like you you're just like you've listed your height and weight on your resume.
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And you said I live on a stage, run on fumes, and I'm willing to take big risks.
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Oh my god, that is so funny.
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When you're the greatest founder in the world, they don't call you the greatest founder.
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They call you Sean Porry. Right. Yeah.
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Basically, I didn't know how to make a resume.
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I didn't know what you're supposed to do.
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So, I just like thought from first principles like what would I do?
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And I it was it's like half NBA draft scouting report like my height, my weight, my wingspan.
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I did a You can see it on there.
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I did a thing that was like You'll probably see this.
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I did skills bar like an NBA 2K where it's like this person is like good at three-point shooting, bad at dunking.
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And I I remember I did this and the guy in the interview was like So, I looked at your um resume, if we're going to call it that.
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And he goes uh Hard work is only like halfway full. Like what? What?
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Why would you Why would you say that you don't work hard? I was like, well, true. That's why.
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Dude, a lot of your stuff is accurate, by the way.
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If you did this at 24, that's over 10 years ago.
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Uh negotiations was high, design medium, programming nothing, public speaking almost 100 out of 100. You had attributes, son.
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You you you knew exactly I mean, you're on point. Writing high.
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Uh this is such a funny website. This is so funny.
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Yeah, organization under 50 like like on the scale of 0 to 100, my organization is a 40.
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That's true, you know that.
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Where's my hard work with my hard work ethic?
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Okay, I give myself like a 70.
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Whereas like, you know, improvisation, I give myself a 90. This is [ __ ] accurate. At least I told no lies. This is so funny.
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And then you have like a collage of all the stuff where it says hot off the press.
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And it has it's a collage of all the times that you've been mentioned in the media. This is awesome.
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It's actually cool to see.
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I bet you a lot of people who listen to this will should go to this When I did the my final interview with the with the billionaire, he scrolled down to the bottom.
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I had this little like motivational poster looking thing.
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I mean, it's all cringe now, dude.
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Like I let's let's be real. It's not cringe.
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It's not It's all very cringe.
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But I'm like it's like proud cringe.
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Like when you look back and you're like, oh, I wasn't geeky in high school, but like, you know, This kid's going places.
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Yeah, but I felt like I was going places and I had one thing on here that got referenced.
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I should have said, "You know why I like the resume?"
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The very last line under things said, "Don't believe your own bullshit." I like that.
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And that like resonated with the you know, the billionaire.
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And um I was like, "Oh man, I was just throwing [ __ ] at the wall."
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This whole thing was like 100 possible things that might resonate.
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You're like, "I actually did believe my own [ __ ] and it worked."
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Like I just threw all this [ __ ] and it got me here. That's awesome.
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I like looking at this website by the way. Yeah.
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Believers versus advisors, I'm on board.
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Be a believer for somebody and if somebody believes in you, it's a good reminder today to to hit them up and thank them for it.
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That's a That's That's the takeaway here. That's it.