I feel like I can rule the world. I know why could be what I want to put my all into it like a Days on the Road. Well, I guess we're live pop. Do you do people ever introduce you by your real full name or you just are you are you pop at all times? Yeah, I some people do but people get offended if I go to a conference and I introduced myself as Anthony and then later they're like wait you're
pomp like who knows you as Anthony like well that is you know, my name my parents didn't name me that well, then then we're going to keep you as Pop we have pop here pop. You've been on the Pod a handful of times and we've talked about you handful of
times and we've been on your pot a handful of times and so it's nice to have you back.
Congratulations on new family member and you're here recently after doing it. So we appreciate that. Yeah, of course just just three dads hanging out on the internet who could have guessed. I had a good joke that I
To do the other day when Sam Altman was in the news and then like like Jack Altman comes out and says something and then Max all been comes out and says something in his sister and he all because I'm like how many fucking Altman's are this more Altman's and pump. Liana's now what's happening here? Because I feel like you have like brothers coming out the woodwork as well. Do you feel that your your sibling dominance is threatened in any way by the Altman's right now?
I did see people making that joke and I did Google how many almonds there are and they are not more almonds to pop Leon. Oh, so we're safe for the moment. Are we going to get back to the episode of second but I got to tell you about our sugar daddies the ones who make these episodes possible. That's right. We're talking about HubSpot because it's Q4 and this is where deals you close. This is where in my company we call people Champions when they closed the year strong if you want to hit your Revenue targets, you need a little help. You got to be using how spots sales Hub. It is a way to supercharge your sales process.
That you have one place where you can find track and close all your deals. You got to be organized. You got to be on top of things. You got to be taking the data from one place the tools you've got your whole team involved. That's why you need sales Hub. I got to tell you you got to stop sticking to the old strategies that we're getting you the old result and start closing more deals with hope spots sales Hub. So go ahead make the switch to HubSpot sales Hub at HubSpot.com / sales. All right, let's get back to the pot what I don't even know how to describe you. So I think a lot of our listeners
Will know you are so we don't have to spend that much time. But like you started out as like kind of a one-trick pony. You're just basically the guy on Twitter who talked about Bitcoin, but now you've evolved significantly beyond that. So you've got like the pump media Empire but then you've also like started I don't even know how many businesses many though. Hold on Sam. Can we do an analogy? No pomp going from Bitcoin laser eyes to real estate and all kinds of other shit that he's doing now. Is it is this
Justin Timberlake from NSYNC now going solo Justin Timberlake or you know, what's the what's the right analogy here who has made such a transition such a life event. Like this it is there anyone that's done this in Hollywood. Well, here's the thing is it's not really a pivot if you kind of expand out off of the internet, right? So if you think about I started my career building companies, then I went and worked at Facebook. Then I started investing and once I was investing, that's really where come the Bitcoin stuff happened.
But even the stuff on the internet, I work directly with Mark Zuckerberg is Sheryl Sandberg for a short period of time at Facebook when they were trying to figure out how do they grow their audiences on Facebook? I remember early on when fuck Jerry the Instagram account. They were trying to go from Instagram. If you're out what's their Facebook strategy? And so the reason why I say that is like, I don't know think of like a Kim Kardashian. She goes from like sex tape to reality TV star to like entrepreneur billionaire to now like Criminal Justice Reform to I think she's going to be president United States.
Day and then look at that and you're like actually the same thing that makes the sex tape go viral get you elected me president today. So like in some ways, it's actually the exact same skillset that just, you know packaged up in a different way and with different Ambitions or aspirations you have this really good job of like brute forcing yourself into like interesting networking opportunities. Like I feel like I think Shawn is actually better than this than I am. But like I just hang out with a small crew of just like internet nerds. You've done a really
Good job of like meeting actual big shots. I think right. I mean like you I don't even know all the people need, you know, but you were telling me how you met Julian Robertson. Who's the guy who started tiger man? It is Tiger management tiger management, but you actually like you and then you just you aren't trying to but you just named Rob zuk and I think you've worked for Snapchat and hung out with Evan a bunch. You've done a really good job of like meeting all these like crazy Fascinating People, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's just like if you're curious person other curious people want to be around those types of folks. And then also I probably more so than many of my friends say yes to Opportunities even when it's not very clear like what is the purpose for doing this? And so if you do that enough times, like I just kind of like shots on goal like you will meet some of these fascinating or successful people but each one of them is very different. I mean Julia Roberts in that story is Mark Marquess Co who
Arted more Greek Capital Management. We did a joint venture with him to raise a couple of venture capital funds and Mark was this former CIO of the UNC endowment back in their late 1990s early 2000s and at that time Julian Robertson was kind of like in his Heyday, right? This was like hedge funds were really getting off the ground Marquess Co and UNC had a really big hand in getting endowment specifically to invest in these hedge funds and Julian Robertson was on his born. So that's how Mark and Julian met now as
Work with tell the story eventually Julian was like Hey, this kid Chase Coleman who now runs tiger Global. He's leaving I'm gonna give him some money and he sent him down to go talk to Mark and Mark gave like the sixth and seventh million-dollar to Chase Coleman to start tiger Global now when you look at that, you're like, okay Marquess Co and Julian Robertson had known each other for 20 or 30 years and I think it's 2019. Mark calls me up one day and he's like, hey Now's the Time like we're going to goes me a bunch of like the legends of Wall Street and one.
Of them was Julian. Julian was actually the first stop of the day. And so the things I remember from it is like one you kind of feel like you're going to meet a legend so like more so than usual you're like nervous but excited and we walk in and he's had the same office for a number of years hit three secretaries, which I thought first of all it's just like that's baller they all sat outside his office and like each had different responsibilities. So I was like, okay like that's that's different and mind you Julian at this point is I think like
Stephanie in his 80s. And so we go in to see him and he sits down kind of in like this like almost like living room area in his office. And he was the single most curious Legend of Wall Street I've ever met he sat with us for an hour and just kept buried him me with questions and and just trying to actually understand Bitcoin and blockchain technology and all these things and you're just like man, this guy does not have to be here right now. He does not have to be doing this stuff like he is Rich on rich on rich and he's also like
He old he's gotta know that like he doesn't have another 50 years to live, but he's sitting here trying to learn and so about halfway through the conversation all of a sudden you could see like the proverbial light bulb goes off in his head and he just sits back in his couch and looks up at the ceiling and like search talking to the ceiling and her being like damn. Am I boring like did I lose them and he had a microphone in the ceiling and a speaker so he could talk directly out to the three like assistance and he basically
Started asking like hey send so-and-so in here, like go find this whatever sounds like this guy like built like Jarvis in his office like way before anyone else has this he is absolutely alleged. So it was a really cool experience unfortunately passed away. But but things like that are just you know, once in a lifetime opportunities that are that are prequel and what I know about Julian and maybe Sean, I don't know if this guy if you every research this guy, so I explain to you but also the listener but Julian he was it was called tiger, right and it was just tiger management.
So he started like tiger which was revolutionary and made him worth. I don't even know how many billions it was revolutionary. Why because what did they do differently? There's made good Investments or did they actually do something? He's one of these one of like the very first like true hedge funds right? Like he basically was hey, I'm not just gonna do like value investing like I'm a true hedge fund and I think that he had like a lot of what we all look at on the internet today. We're like, oh that person is doing something interesting it was different. He had high conviction and he ended up being right and so he was able to gather
a lot of assets whose able to drive a pretty good return and he did it at a time where this whole concept of like hedging or like going long and short wasn't necessarily the traditional way of investing and so I don't know if they actually consider him like the Godfather of hedge funds but he basically could be considered that and then, you know, the lure of Julian kind of expanded even more when a bunch of people who work for him left he would cede them and when he would cede them to get them off the ground those guys now known as tiger
Her Cubs became very successful tiger Global probably being the most successful and so it was like, hey, he was good as an investor who's even better at like a talent, you know kind of identifier and then seating these people to create these great firms. Tiger cubs is like PayPal Mafia basically a finance but it's way bigger. So Google tiger cubs Finance Wikipedia and you could just go to the Wikipedia page, but they have sections where it's called tiger cubs, tiger Grand Cubs and tiger great-grand cubs, and it's literally it looks like if I'm
Going through it looks like a hundred plus names and I guess it's he keep found these guys and he because of his culture and because of kind of his Vibe. They've all kind of taken a little bit a little bit of them and it's some of the biggest names like including that guy. What was the guy named Bill who had like that who like brought down the economy. Was
it a heroic unplugged? He unplugged Wall Street accidentally had tripped over the cord and unplugged it.
Yeah. Yeah. He like brought down the economy like through a couple bad bets and then there's like Chase Coleman who?
Is worth I don't know 20 billion dollars who has tiger man. What was it called? I'm getting all the names wrong tiger and then you have like Couture. I can't even say the same because they're all names that love
juice. He's our wow. This guy's prolific. They're starting Gucci go to
these are
here saying it's a word you've only read you've never had to say out loud. Like, you know, yeah, it's embarrassing. You know, what Hermione and I was like, I just reading this word. I don't know. How what the hell is this? What's her name? I have no idea how to say this. It's the worst that you accelerate.
Throw you just say I'm really quickly and hope no one noticed that you mispronounce them.
Why not? What attributes do you think other than curiosity? Did he have that kind of spread to all these other guys who have done like for example, Chase Coleman is an interesting one because you can't really like if you Google Chase Coleman the guy's worth I think 15 billion something in that range. There's like four pictures of him on the internet like what and so these like mysterious guys are always there always fascinating. What attributes do you think some of these people have that started with Julian? Yes, I
Obviously I met Julian there's a bunch of other folks that I've met over the years that kind of fall similar to Julian and usually it is not unfortunately in a situation room. Like hash want to learn from you. You're usually going to like ask them for something whether it's for money for an introduction or whatever. So like the power Dynamic is definitely off and it'd be weird to like sit there. Like hey, by the way now the pitches over like let me Grill you for 30 minutes, but in those
conversations what you basically find,
it's like they're all very very
curious to is like these
guys just have like brass balls, right?
Even know how to describe it. Other
than that they are willing to just make insane bets at times when other people are not, you know, another person that maybe doesn't get the same Fame and recognition as Julian but I put up there as one of the best investors over the last 50 years is Bill Miller and you know Bill in the late 90s people were giving him shit because he said he was a value investor, but it's sort of high-tech stocks and so obviously Tech exploded he was outperforming everybody. There's a book that I recently read where he was the
Only investor to outperformed the S&P 500 for 10 years straight in the 90s. And
so everyone was like you're not a real value
investor and like first of all like it's stupid to be like, oh you don't your results don't count because like you didn't actually do it the way you said you were going to do it.
But Amazon was one of his big bets and so Amazon
crashes like 90% in the.com crash bill
just backs up the truck and buy some more and I think at
one point he was the single largest outside shareholder of Amazon and look like 15%
As you look at that you're like okay one, but you have
to like find Amazon
to then you have to like not get
scared when it drops like 80 90
percent and then three is even if you're not scared you then have to like hold your nose
and put way more money in to buy it
all of this extra like equity. And so I think that is
a common theme is just like conviction and like the ability to just bet over and over again regardless of what's happening. And then the last one is like these dudes are junkies man. They're obsessed. I almost think of it like kind of a gym
rat bait.
Not only are curious but like they do the work and so in that book about Bill Miller they talk about
he was in Baltimore and he had seats behind home plate for the Baltimore Orioles
and he used to bring research reports and
read them in the stands in between
Innings and it's just like like okay nerd right? Like that's insane. But also like that's why you end up only 15% of Amazon is
because like you did the work it doesn't happen by accident as I think that like that's just a great example of all of these folks have been super successful.
Are common themes that they all share that's intimidating? I think right like to hear the story. It's like what I wanted when I hear that I get my real more
father is no more intimidated phrase then that's intimidating. I think right now, I'm scared right guys. I know you're right. And also, I think the hard part is is the line between genius and idiot is so so thin it's like, oh am I Bill Miller backing up the truck? You know when Amazon
crash 90% or am I just a fucking idiot putting all my money into a loser that like his showing it's a loser right now and you know that history is told years later. And so I think that's the hard part is you have to have not just conviction in the investment. You have to have conviction in yourself that I despite the market conditions despite the current results right now. I'm able to correctly differentiate between a winner and a loser if you don't have that conviction in yourself you can
Can't even make you can't even have the conviction in an investment to pull that off. Yeah, you're basically saying
I'm smarter than everyone else
right like everyone else is selling this thing. Yeah, and I'm gonna go buy it and
like I mean again, that's why they call them, you know kind of like the Masters of the Universe in the hedge fund world is like the people who end up make a lot of money. They actually seem to be smarter than everyone else. Now how many of those are there? Well, there's way less than the number of people who claim to be, you know, those Masters of the Universe and that's I think Sean like the difference between the fools and the
geniuses.
Tell a story that's that's like that my my friend was in a he's a real estate and he was around he was making his fortune in early for two seconds mid-20s 2006 2007 and in 2008 happens and he's going from zero to you know, 25 million dollars in like two or three years thinks he's you know, super smart and 2008 happens and he described it later. He's like, he's like, oh there was like a tunnel and everyone was running out like there was
Fire on the other side of the tunnel and there are running out and they were like here take this and I was like, wow, they're just giving me this this is amazing. This is way like this price is fantastic is that I just kept marching forward and everybody else is running away screaming fire and handing me their their assets on the way out and Yeah turns out I should have ran away from the fire because he lost everything that 08 crash now, it's that same you know that same feeling would be there at the.com crash. Everybody's yelling fire running.
Away selling things for pennies on the dollar and you know the difference I think ultimately comes down to a do you can you can you tell yourself why you were buying something when everybody else is selling do you have a belief in this right? Like, you know, I heard somebody say one sister had somebody else who made a fortune during the.com crash and she goes she goes. Yeah. It was amazing. Everything was on sale. It was Black Friday. Everything was 80% off. I couldn't believe it the best companies in the world where 80% off and I don't know if they were going to return back to where they
Were then but I just knew these are still the best companies in the world and you know, they're now 80% off and and so I you know, I think that there's there's you hear stories on both sides and I think he's got to be careful that you know, you don't want to be the guy running into the fire and how do you differentiate? I think you have to have like some ground truth that you believe that that you're willing to stand on you're willing to lose on you're willing to look back and say I'm okay if I'm wrong on this I'm willing to lose the money. I lost if I it turns out that this this idea was incorrect.
But when you guys hear those stories is this like one of those things where you're watching a UFC fight and you're a little drunk and you're like, you know, I think I could maybe get a lucky punch and compete. You know what I mean, or do you guys hear this in your like I'm just not in the same league or I don't even want to be you know what I mean? Like, do you what's your reaction when you hear the stories?
I mean, I think it just depends on like this quote circle of competence, right? You know, if you look back there's only one time in my life where I've had the conviction felt like a did the work and like really backed up the truck and that was the Bitcoin stuff and Bitcoin has gone from a thousand to twenty thousand and 2017. It crashed down to like 3,200 bucks and I went on National Television. I was like basically you guys ready. It's like this thing is going to come flying back or buying you know, but whatever. We actually one of my favorite memories is kind of got like lost in
The internet archives as we issued a Million Dollar Bet to anyone on Wall Street and we were like we'll take Bitcoin you take any other asset like just pick anything over the next 10 years. If you beat us like you get a million bucks if Bitcoin outperforms, we get a million bucks and no one took it and so at some point you're just like, okay that's enough of a signal that like people may not have conviction but they also like know the person not to bet against and I think like that's something in UFC is like you may look at like a UFC card and you're like, okay. I think I know who's gonna win like these five, you know,
Matches, but that one match.
I think I know who's going to win but I'm not going to bet against the other person. So I'm like
sit that one out. I feel like a lot of times there's that level of conviction across the market and so Amazon, you know people knew it was like a pretty good company but no one had the conviction to buy same thing with Bitcoin when it crashed like everyone was
like, I think this is
interesting but like I don't have the conviction to
buy so really it's less
of a leap. Sometimes Than People realize but again, I've been doing this now for a decade. There's one time I can think of that I was like, oh, yeah, I think I actually
Ali know something everyone else doesn't any other time I even tried to think that way I'm like probably lose all my money I should just you know, sit down.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good point. You have to identify that these things shouldn't be like once every month you have this Grand new conviction bet. It's like maybe once in a decade that you see something that that is so non-consensus, but you believe in it's also hilarious. Did anybody consider taking you up on that deal where they just like somebody walked into tiger like a sir?
Tony pump Leon. Oh has offered a Million Dollar Bet and they're like, I don't know Tony. I'm out all that like did anybody even like it register like while what happened to want to know like seeing me? She wrote an article about it? Like it was like it was definitely out there, right? But here's the funny part
about the whole thing the
people who were like we're even considering it. We're like all the like
fools that just wanted like media coverage. So they were like trying to come up with these like weird, you know aspects of the deal
like, okay. I'll take your bet.
Yet but we have to take the return divided by 2 times it by like the number of times I jump on my
head, you know, and then also I get a multiplier
and where it's like dude you're way too smart for
us. Obviously like we just want to straight up bed. If your should not let us
know. Yeah, also, they could have perfectly hedged that been I think if they just bought Bitcoin in addition to making the bent, right? So like yeah
like to think we issued the BET before the smart people started paying attention. So I prefer yeah, we were good or somebody would have figured out how to definitely beat us on were you inspired?
By the Warren Buffett million dollar S&P 500 bet is that the is that what where you took its course? I think that
that was one of the smartest things that he's done like buffets interesting because a lot of the advice that he gives I think it's, you know, pretty solid, you know circle of competence being one, you know kind of value investing like all these things that were kind of talking about here. I think very much draws back to Buffett and then obviously Graham and Dodd all these guys, but he also is like a master marketer like Warren Buffett was the original
Nance influencer, right and I've joked a million times that if he was today Buffett in his 30s, you have a sub stack a Twitter account a podcast. He'd be streaming on Tick-Tock like doing all this stuff and so he understood how to like Leverage the tools he had at the time with the media and so he didn't need to do it but a way to really continue to drive like The Lure of Warren Buffett is like it she the BET say no hedge fund manager can beat the S&P over like a decade or whatever. We just talked about in the in the 90s only Bill Miller did it, right? So it's very hard. There was like a
Read where I remember. I was like beating myself up even over this podcast where I was like am I going to be a content creator or if I or my going to be a businessman who actually does the damn thing and I started reading, you know, I read a lot of biographies and I actually started thinking about it differently and you realized that a lot of these great people whether in business or not. They actually had newsletters and they like I remember what's the guy's name Tomas Tomas like recently came out with like a newsletter and I remember thinking like why the hell does this
This guy need to do this. Why is he doing this paid newsletter? But then like Warren Buffett his annual letters were basically newsletters. I mean, he wrote them as such and then like I remember reading about like Ben Franklin Ben Franklin had a newspaper and he actually wrote constantly about this. I'm reading about George Washington George Washington constantly wrote editorials or Bill Ackman. Does this, you know, where he's like, he's Twitter now, but before that he had some other things and I remember thinking like no actually like some of these greats who are great business.
But also our content producers, you know, maybe they're not that's not their income Source, but they really are like wonderful content people. You know, I'm talking
about I like how you just used content producer content producers is nice. That's that's better than content creator, which is better than influenza. Actually. I think that's all that we need guys is like you just laid out you like do I want to be a content creator like an influencer or a businessman and I think we actually just need to be content man. I think we need to like we just need to level up the
Raised so that we don't sound like little bitches when we think I'm a I'm a content creator who tweets all day. It's like no no. No, you're a businessman. I'm a Content man. We're just a couple of couple of men couple of producers. Well, I
remember one time we had this guest on and Sean asked this particular get this particular guess created courses and Sean said something where Sean goes, you know, I create courses to and sometimes I feel like a fraud because if I'm so good at this instead of teaching it I should just go and do
It and I thought that was a really good question and this question really offended this person, but Shawn you didn't mean it to offend this person. And so I wasn't I did think that they should have been upset but I also had that same like I'm like that's a my fraud but then you start thinking about it. Well, you know Warren Buffett actually taught a Dale Carnegie course, he actually also taught a finance course, I forget at what university but it's actually common that some of these people are teaching are creating and that has kind of helped me like
Feel like less, you know like less embarrassed sometimes about what I do.
I think that you
can go through tons of
entrepreneurs. You can go through tons of your kind of financial managers. This is very very common. And there's a question of if you can't teach it to you actually understand it. Right like it's almost like a flip side to it. But if you really kind of just zoom out you like. Okay, what is all this content stuff? I've been there right people would be like, oh he has a podcast and I used to be like cringe. It was like something like stabbed me in the stomach and twisted it when they would introduce me that way right now. I'm like
You're
disrespecting all this other work that I did just say that I have a podcast like yes, I'm a podcast but also like I wear shoes. Are you going to introduce me as like, oh Pop wear shoes. And so I remember kind of going back and I think about like weird dude. It's like
calling milk cat food. You know what? I mean? It's like yeah, it's like yeah,
it's like it's just marketing right at the end.
Day, like it really is just marketing and
whether it's Twitter, whether it's podcast, whatever the people who intend to be
good at it don't think of it and like sit down like create a marketing calendar. Like I don't know they're like taking a poop and they pull out their phone. It's or tweeting like random things like they go viral right
at the end of the day.
It's just marketing and so in some weird way, maybe we all shouldn't like be ashamed or cringe when people say that stuff like if you're
better known for how
good you are at marketing like maybe that's actually telling you something right? And so I think as we all have that is almost like
like a something eats at us or it's like an insecurity but
whatever who cares like
if they could do it they do it themselves.
Yeah to clarify Sam. I never said fraud fraud means one thing I said, I feel like a little bitch when I do courses and there's a big difference fraud means you're misrepresenting yourself a little bitch means you're representing yourself as a little bitch and the and you have to ask yourself is that accurate or is that not accurate? And yeah, that's how I felt.
I felt like a little bit for doing courses when it's like should I be doing something else with my time? This is I like to teach but but maybe maybe that's like, you know, not the best use of time. If you are listen to the steps of right now and you're tired, you're just get overwhelmed with the amount of value that we're adding to your life. You're dehydrated have a sip of water and let me tell you about HubSpot because the HubSpot podcast network has a podcast
I want to tell you about. It's called success story. It's hosted by Scott
Clary success story features Q&A sessions with successful.
This leaders keynote presentations and conversations on sales marketing and business startups and Entrepreneurship. There are a bunch of cool episodes. I'll tell you about one right now one is why you can't learn from your mistakes. That's your hindsight bias where Scott breaks down our tendency to believe that after event has occurred that we would have predicted or expected it and he unravels the facets behind hindsight bias so that you can avoid its pitfalls. So go ahead and listen to success story wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's get back to
the pod.
Sorry, I I paraphrase that incorrectly I was trying to I actually think I made you sound better, but you know what? I'm honest. I'd rather be
honest. Okay pump you brought some ideas for us. You know that this is the idea podcast you brought some ideas. Let's rattle them off. So start with number 1 what ideas and Trends are opportunities. Do you see right now in the market?
Yeah, so this this first one is one that we're
actually doing. So I thought a lot about it housing affordability is the worst it's been in this Century. We continue to see people are worried. Like hey, I want to buy a house. I should I rent should I buy what our interest rates going to do all these different things but there's no dominant voice in terms of news commentary of data. And so we started a company called resi Club. The idea really in the beginning is just go educate people about what is happening. And so I'm not an expert on residential real estate. I don't know that many.
Other experts on residential real estate. So we were able to partner up with a gentleman named Lance Lampert Lance was the real estate editor at Fortune Magazine. So he's like Coco legit, right? It's got 75 thousand followers on Twitter. A lot of people in the industry all follow him. And we basically just said to him like look man. We want to go build the dominant platform in residential real estate coverage. Why don't we do it together? We know how to scale things. We know how to grow this stuff and monetize, you know the content you are the expert and so let's partner up and so we've gone ahead we just got started about two months old.
And you know, I love these types of businesses because they kind of look stupid almost in the beginning
like oh you guys just like created a
newsletter. Well, yeah, that's exactly what we did and then it turns into like a media site and then it turns into a data
product and then like, I don't know
ten years from now are we going to have the information where we can go and see like, you know general contractors in different markets actually build affordable
housing like maybe and so you start with a
small little thing that you can build profitably and you don't have to raise money or kind of do anything where there's these you know huge.
Ends, but as you grow the business you can
increase your ambition over time. So I think a lot of people start with like massive ambition. Like let's go to Mars and sure there are some companies where that definitely makes sense but for businesses like this, it's just like hey, there's a problem in around housing affordability. A lot of people aren't talking about it. We should have more people talking about it and then we'll figure out how big it can get and how ambitious we can be over time. But we kind of earned the right to go do that and that's what we're doing. How much did you fund it with?
Way less than people would think we were profitable within the first month. And so we actually wouldn't have even need to put money into the bank account. But I think we put a hundred thousand dollars to get started and never touched it because basically, you know within the first week we were profit
and the market for this is it Brokers real estate agents that want to pay for this or you look at investors or is it the average person who might be you know on Zillow looking for a home?
Yeah, so the beauty of
residential real estate is it's the largest asset class in the world, but none of us who are like, oh we're so smart. We're like this is people were financed people. We have podcast. We never think about residential real estate is like the largest asset class in the world. We're like,
oh stocks or crypto or bombs or whatever.
And so what you end up getting is it's a very Niche thing in that is residential real estate, but it's a very big thing in that its large asset class in the world. And so what that involves is home builders, it involves real estate agents. It involves people who want to buy or sell homes and involves.
People who are doing mortgages like lenders Etc. So there's a huge kind of ecosystem of folks who all need to be aware of what's happening in this industry. And so it's one of these great businesses where it's it's like small and specific but also large and Broad at the same time and I think you're doing it why so I'm looking at your pay wall and you're saying that like basically you get access to a Regional Housing tracker data like some type of data set. I think that's smart. Who is we?
Just Lance because it looks like Lance is doing all of the writing is he also somehow aggregating all of this data as well? So Lance is think of him as like the editor-in-chief like this guy is lights out. Right? And so as soon as he was like interested, I was like, oh, what do we need to do? How do we like run through brick walls, like get to work with you. So it's very much like go find partners that you like look up to and want to learn from etcetera and he does all the content today. Eventually. There will be an entire team, but I think one of the big lessons that
I've learned over the last, you know, five or six years of kind of like playing on the internet and build these
businesses. She just don't need that much.
And yes, we have an advantage. I've got a big audience, right? Let's been doing this for a long time and really understands how to create content and kind of write articles and interview people
Etc. But at the end of the day, we've now
created multiple businesses like this where we start with like two or three people and you can run for 6 or 12 months and get them profitable with serious cash flow and then you start to hire a team salespeople other editorial folks etcetera.
I give you a critique. Yeah, I think this is awesome. I love the real deal, which is the a real estate blog. Your premium. Pearl plan is $150 a year. That is so stupid man. Why aren't you charging way more? It's so hard to do stuff on $150 a year. Yeah, we're official hard like for sure will increase the price. But if you think about a lot of times like even give you another example, so Barry a times is a kind of Daily News 4
Tech business and financed and started as an email and when you're building these
businesses you basically have a choice
you can like have a high CPM and be okay with not selling out 100% of the ads sometimes or were you can have a lower CPM and just saw out the ads I tend to always go for like let's sell out all of the ad inventory and build the muscle of being able to do it and you can always raise prices later same thing here with the subscription for Reggie Club
is starting at 150 bucks. It's like if you're interested in this
and we're actually creating something valuable.
There is zero
friction for you paying 150 bucks a year over time. We will increase the price but that's much better and gives us a better signal then let's say we came out with like a thousand dollars a year and people like man, this is valuable but it's not worth a thousand dollars. At least now, we know okay, we have something that people want it's helpful to them. They're not churning and now we got to go and do price Discovery over the next 12 months or so. We'll figure out what that price point is, but I'd rather start with a lower price make sure we've got the right product and then raise prices later. I like this idea a lot. I think it's a really
good idea.
Via, this is like a fifty two hundred million dollar win bootstrapped. I think it's gonna be great, you know, maybe more but like I think that's a very realistic outcome from this but I got to ask you, you know, it's interesting to see ideas when you're at the end of the idea maze meaning like you figure out like oh, this is the opportunity. We should go with your a guy who's got a thousand different opportunities thousand different ideas of what you could go do can you walk me through the idea amazed how did you land at this and like what were the kind of like other paths that you considered and you know, like for example
This is residential. Why not commercial should it even be real estate or should it be financed because actually have a good foothold financing. I'm sure you know, we haven't talked about this but I am sure that there was a little bit of a walk down an idea maze looking for a way. What is the real opportunity here? And then it all sorts of starts to come together. You get the right operator figure out the right idea the right brand then you go for it
100% So this one's actually a great one to talk about this because we actually I'm called like a false start we had partnered with somebody else who they were not in residential.
State the way that they cut the market was by geography as they were very focused on South Florida. And so it was like, okay, we think that there's a massive business to build that content first that eventually leads to kind of data products that is in the real estate market and when we got started we didn't know a lot of people right and so I went around and talked to a couple people I found someone I said, hey they do really good work. It was a person. I really enjoyed kind of working with and talking to on a day-to-day basis. And so we got started but it was very much like small geography all about
South Florida and then the idea was like will go to like Tampa and then we'll go to like Orlando and then we'll go to Atlanta and then we'll like just go through these geographies and it didn't work for a whole bunch of different reasons. Probably some of it was our fault. Some of it was the other person was, you know, very focused on what they wanted to do in terms of the content. They had already been creating and and so we kind of just were like,
hey this isn't that this like explosive
thing the market isn't like pulling this into existence and
so like rather than banging our
heads against the wall for the next 10 years together like
You
had a great thing going before we came along and try to convince you to do this with us. Like why don't you just keep doing that thing? I don't want to like, you know, hinder your success in your growth and they will like go back to the drawing board. And so that's the second attempt was with this resi club. And so you're right that like one there's an idea maze but also I think a lot of people don't realize how often there's false starts to these businesses Nikita bear who is a I think friends of all of ours he's talked about this a bunch with consumer
social apps. He's like
product Market fit is not
a single metric like you just know right? It's like everything is exploding and you obviously have product Market fit but in both of the apps, tbh and gas that he launched and eventually sold to Facebook and then a Discord. I think he's publicly described many times. He would launch it. It wouldn't hit they would go back like make a couple changes like launch it again. And sometimes he would launch like five six seven eight nine ten times and then eventually there was the right combination of all these things that work and so
there's two ways to do
entrepreneurship one is like I'm going to
In the world to my will and like here's the thing that's going to work for girls with the market tells me I'm going to make it happen and then there's like this iterative approach and a lot of these things that I work on are much more iterative. And so you just have to be really good at like go 100% in run the test as perfectly as possible would be willing to cut bait and try a different combination of the inputs. If for some reason it's not exploding in the way you want it Sean. You got to tell the Nikita
story which one
just just the this last one this last thing.
That he
did. Yeah, he was he was telling us he was building the app and launching it over and over again and renaming it like what was happening one time. They renamed it to one thing and then like took off in the gay Market. He's like, all he did was change the name of the app and it appealed to like, you know only gay people and then he changed the app name and I went back and it changed how the app was going. You know, he I think he says something that he's like, you know, the most important thing for a consumer startup is like develop a machine that will allow you to launch test.
Like real like High Fidelity test of your product like that is actually your most important product at the beginning which I kind of agree with but also kind of disagree with I think that's a really good way to do the apps. He's trying to do which are like, it doesn't work. If it doesn't have a K-factor over one, right? Like if it's not viral his apps literally like don't work and then this app was like, I don't really care about retention long-term anything like it was like I'm going to get you in it's going to spam invite your friends and then there's a pay wall.
And I need like two percent of people to buy the in-app purchase and if under 2% of people do it, this doesn't really like make a lot of money, but if I can get to or percent of more this thing will make a few million dollars of profit in the next 90 days and you know, so that works really well for that. But if you go look at how some of the great like consumer products are built they didn't do any of that shit like Pinterest sound like Pinterest sitting around being like, okay. I need to create a system where I can launch systematically in high schools over and over again until I get this correct, right and you know, Facebook and Snapchat.
they did eventually figure out a way to like roll out and grow that that they did but they didn't have this like thousand shots on goal with different variations trying to get the virality to be just right like I'd like I think when the kid is doing is awesome because it's such a different game than anybody else really was playing however, you know, his advice is basically how to build a virus not how to create the next like, you know, social network and I think people think of them as the genius consumer social network guy and it's like no he's
Basically built like viruses that goes on teen teens phones and you know like that that he's very very good at it's like what are you
optimizing for? Right? You know, if you want to build the next great social network like yeah K-factor matters in the beginning, but actually what matters more is like, what is the 30-60-90 day retention if you want to just like go viral and be on every single, you know, 14 year olds phone in America, then the only thing that matters is K Factor, right? And what do you think it was his
abs both of those apps within I don't know 100 days of
Acquired or 200 days of getting acquired, you know shut down and wrote off to 0 right because they didn't have retention. But the one thing I would give them a ton of credit for which I think was really impressive was a you went back to the well what most people don't do is they do a space they become super knowledgeable about it and they get so jaded it have so much scar tissue that even though they are the best equipped person in the world to go back and build in that space again. They are so turned off to go become a beginner at something else, which I think is to find life choice to make from like a variety of life, but like not optimal from a
From like the playing the game of Entrepreneurship. The second thing is he was in the world of I'm going to build a hit social app and the way that it hit social app works is like get 100 million plus users and then start to make money on ads and like raise Venture Capital do all this when he went back the second time. He like broke down the fourth wall of Silicon Valley was like What if I don't fund this and what if I just like charge a little bit of money and like what if I just make a few million dollars of profit like every every month
And like I don't know how long it will last but I think I can make like whatever, you know, like five million bucks and not in the summer. That sounds pretty awesome. Let me try to do that. And nobody nobody in consumers not like the mobile gaming guys were like, yeah, of course like get a bunch of downloads and then charge like, you know a small amount and see if you can make your key metric is our poop but like the kids the mobile gaming guys don't build social apps to social apps guys. Don't build mobile games. Those guys don't build Enterprise sales, like people very rarely are able to like wreath
I think the rules of their game and he rethought the rules of the consumer social game and was like, I'm going to build a consumer social app, but it's going to have the monetization of a mobile game and I think in basically like a six-month span it made like seven or eight million dollars in gross revenue with like, you know, and you know, it was very profitable for him in that period time. Then he sold the thing and the you know, that that is a very impressive way to like most people can't do that. Most people can't rewrite the rules of the of their
Of their
game, there's two things that you maybe think of the first is there's a whole group of these people who are like trying to rewrite the rules or think about this differently one of my favorite examples and I don't want to share who it is because I don't know if they're okay with it, but they created like a ability to make photos in your Instagram story blurry and basically you would have to pay on Apple pay to like unblurred the photo. So obviously I call the only fan girls would put it on their Instagram story and it would be like just blurry enough for people like, oh that looks like something I might really like
looking at and then it would they pay like $2 $5 $10 or whatever it was set at and so you're like bootstrapping off of these massive audiences these people already have but it's like a little feature and they don't raise money for it. It's just like basically how much money can we generate as quickly as possible and I mean they make a lot of money, right? And so it works so it is possible speaking of folks who go back to the well, you guys know who Brad Jacobs is
yeah. He created like six billion dollar companies now or something right that he's the guy he's the goat.
We're time trying to I've been trying to get him on the Pod. I bet try and I can't I can't he's got a break coming out. He'll he'll definitely come on. He's got a book coming out. So he's 100% going on. I can't get in touch with them what we'll talk later. But he's 100% going on everyone's podcast because he's got a book coming out which is like the best time to get these guys but so about four or five years ago somebody like almost like like a back alley drug deals like check out Brad Jacobs and I was like never heard of them. Like, who's that Ghana Wikipedia and literally for a week and a half like didn't sleep was just like all over scouring the
Trying to figure out like what obscured podcast to this guy do
because he just did it over and over and over again.
And what do you suppose she does is he just does Roll-Ups like Wayne huizenga is another guy who's like famous for doing this
and what Brad did is
just figure out a business model figure out a funding mechanism start winning and then go around and tell everyone like hey, I'm going to do the same Playbook and I'm gonna win again and then people gave them money. So explain what he did. So one of the things that they did was in the waste industry,
Which also I think Wayne huizenga had a big one as well in the waste industry. Basically, they would go and where he
started was. He didn't go to Major markets. He didn't even go to like what he
calls like secondary markets. He basically went to like Podunk towns and was like, I'm gonna buy the landfill and then once he bought the landfill he was like, okay, there's like seven companies that I'll pick up trash in the surrounding air and they bring to this landfill and he was just like what start likes my purring off each one of them. He'd buy the first one they buy the second one the third one and eventually he don't all seven of the companies plus the landfill and so
He just did this across the country and he would roll it all up. That one was like I think early 90s was called United
Way systems. And so he took that company public and it
ended up being like a multibillion-dollar outcome. He's done that same thing like six or seven times now and so you're just like, okay building a billion dollar companies cool building to you like damn like you've got the golden touch. If you do more than
five. There's like one of you
right he's done it with so we did the waste Manager Management thing then
It United Rentals which was like renting heavy like dump trucks and porta-potties and bobcats and things like that. Then he did it with EXO Logistics. I think which is currently published XP 0 which is currently a publicly traded company. I think he did it two or three other times. I mean, he's done it many many times. I think his book is called how to make a billion dollars or something like that. Like it's a pretty it's a pretty baller titled
if you do I'm going on my first million.
Look quite literally beneath me.
You want to know something funny about about how he describes himself. He's like, you know, I'm a career CEO serial entrepreneur like he is very much like what you would expect from a guy who's built multiple billion dollar companies. But if you Google his name, you know on LinkedIn how there is like a like a preview of the website on LinkedIn. It's as Brad Jacobs is an
influencer because I think he has like the influencer
like categorization on LinkedIn and they just like autofill it
but it's like the classic imagined.
Brad Jacobs like I you're not really like a multibillion-dollar entrepreneur, you're just an
influencer. He was like blowing a gasket. Yeah, that's so true. It's that's what it says is first top link on Google Brad. Jacobs is an influencer period God. I'm like stop disrespecting that man.
The reason he's cool is like, okay. So he lives in Greenwich, Connecticut. He wears like a suit and tie most of the time he's he's he looks like a it looks like a suit and I'm sure he's very professional and a wonderful CEO, but if you actually like listen to some of the things he says he's way more
Of a he's way more entrepreneurial than like his picture looks you know what I mean? Like he's got that he's got that artist Vibe a little bit the guys the guys special he's very fascinating but before his book came out and or is coming out. He's been really under the radar for how successful. He's he's a really fascinating person. Yeah DM one of my favorite activities is like if you ever reading an article like Bloomberg, does this a lot and actually the financial times they'll like randomly talk about these like really wealthy.
People and I just immediately copy paste Google like hey, who is this person? And recently, I did it and let me see if I could find this guy's name real quick because it was like one of these things where
as soon as you
go down the rabbit hole. You're like wow, this is like a whole different game. What is this? Dude's name? Oh here you go, Benny Steinmetz, so they call him an Israeli Tycoon, but he like got in a bunch of trouble and there's like fraud and I think he maybe even got arrested.
Etc but like he's in the Commodities game and you're like, I've never heard of Benny Steinmetz. He sounds like he's built some massive companies, but also in the Commodities game like sometimes there's gold in the mine and other times there's a
promise of gold in the mine, you know type thing. And so you're just like
how many of these people are out there that are not on the Internet or not. Well known in the like internet
Circle and sure you can go look at the Forbes 400 you can
go look at like all these lists that people put together. There's way more
People that are completely unknown that I think known and so it does kind of remind you like you don't you only got to be right once or twice and you can achieve immense amount of wealth or success by doing just like the basic things
go by assets that end up being valuable.
If you Google this guy, he looks like one of these guys that could like find a pressure point on your neck that makes you like collapse. He looks he looks he looks very legitimately like a killer and I researched him as well. He
I was in the idea. So like he's a trained military guy. And if you Google him, he looks scary. He looks like he'll plead to sleep
more MFM in just a minute first. Let me tell you about one of the joys in my life. And that is a virtual assistant. You know, here's the scenario. I'm not in my company's I spend 30% of my time just doing random bullshit the stuff that has to get done but it's not creativity doesn't require me and it doesn't add a bunch of value to the business. It's just stuff it. So that stuff is what a virtual assistant does. So having a virtual assistant is a no-brainer.
Whether it's travel booking email inbox or just knocking stuff off your personal to-do list, that would have just lingered there forever. I think it's a no-brainer if you're a business owner, you should definitely do it. I think one of the best ways to find assistant is Shepherd. So go to support shepard.com super affordable. It's something that you know, you don't need to have the biggest business ever be the biggest big shot in order to afford it. So it's amazing go to sports a.com check them out and tell them I sent you they'll take good care if you do that. So Spore shepard.com check it out. All right, let's get back to the pot
what other ideas are in?
Interesting to you at the moment. So I'll give you a couple categories. There's one that I like the best thing I had for just like persistent Patrol companies. So if you think about one of the big problems that city states and the national government going to have is like they have to get more money. They're broke. Right and if you're broke either like cut your costs as much as possible or you go make more money. They're not going to cut costs. I got to make more money. One of the best examples is in New York City the congestion tax. That's one of the few taxes that I'm on board with your on board. Okay? All right. Let me explain what it is first and then we can
Debate the way it works is like I don't know 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. If you drive from like outside of lower
Manhattan into Lower Manhattan, they charge you like
20 box. Like it's a pretty
large tax every single day. So it only is
charged one time, but you can imagine all the cars that are driving from above 59th Street below 59th Street between 9 to 5 Monday through Friday and they're going to hit this 20 dog tags. It's a way for the city to raise more money get more income. It's called a
Congestion taxes first one in the United States, but this has been happening in Europe and other places for quite a while. So it's not a New Concept. It's just new to America. They're also considering charging people like a thousand dollars a month or something really high in order to own a car in the city. There's all kinds of ideas because it all comes back to this thing, but they need more money right there broke and over the last couple of years in cities like New York people who were paying a lot in taxes. They left like there's the infamous story of David Tepper. He was in New Jersey and he was responsible.
3% of the state's budget and the taxes he personally paid and he moved to Florida and there's all these articles that were like the state of New Jersey is going to go broke because David Tepper is moving. And so I think those for like some sort of Family Medical situation he moved for a couple of years when he moved back the way the story goes is that he called up the state treasurer and was like, yo, you got 120 million coming to you next year like put it into your budget. It's a
really wealthy people. Yeah. It's and it's New Jersey. It's not like it's like, North Dakota.
Where I think the state of New Jersey was dependent on this guy for material
percentage of their state
budget so wealthy people been moving.
So my idea is like, how are they going to get more Revenue right. Now? A lot of Revenue is derived from like parking tickets or like stupid things where they have humans walking around trying to like catch people doing these are supposed to be doing so I think there's going to be an entire rise of businesses that just use computer vision to do the same thing. Like anything that can be automated will be automated rather than that of humans with their lazy eyes.
Walking around just have computers that constantly monitor it so parking tickets is an easy one
Fire Marshals. Like how many
times have you gone to an event? And it's like, you know Fire
Marshal says 220 people can be here. You know, I think there's a
thousand people in this room right now.
So like they can just automate. Okay, you have a
500 dollar fine. Every single time of this event venue is cetera elevators. Like you can just go through this and see over and over again that computer vision will just become like the persistent. I it's scary like I don't like the idea of this.
But I do think someone's going to build this technology and it's not going to be the government. And so we're likely to see a huge rise of these businesses that used what is pretty like standard technology at this point. It's just like count the number of humans walking into a building and stay on top of it. So that the government can generate more Revenue.
Well, there's also like an l.a. Don't they have the Mansion tax right? Like it's like, oh, it's you sell a home for more than five million dollars. There's just like there's a new tax and they're like, what are
these New York has it to live in small homes?
Muhahahaha, like they'll never
Don't let her down sighs like we got him we could charge literally anything we want and they're still going to pay it.
You know, I kind of agree with
you that that getting this Revenue stream is going to be very important. Obviously. I hate the idea of the like persistent Patrol computers basically finding you for taking every misstep, but I think you're the root thing you're talking about. Like how do you help governments make more money is going to be a business opportunity because you're right. We
do need there's a competition right now between
taxes and tipping like when you go to the coffee shop, there's literally going to be a competition between is on the bill if it's itemized does the government get more money out of the bill or does the Tipping because we've become this like tipping Society where somebody like pours a coffin the like that'll be 15 percent on top of the bill. And so if the government continues to increase sales tax like very much these bills are going to get inflated because it's just everyone's got more hands in the cookie jar.
So Sean New York has a Mansions tax. Do you want to know what the threshold is in order to pay it? No, what is it? Alright. So keep in mind. I think the average sale of a New York home is like 800,000 the Mansion tax starts at a million dollars. So
basically like you have a separate bedroom mansion.
Yeah, so their mansion tax, I think it's a close to four percent it ranges I think but I think it goes up to four percent. So basically if you purchase a
Two-bedroom apartment in New York City you basically have to say all right. Here's an additional 40,000 just for buying or is it for selling? I don't remember which one but someone pays roughly twenty Thirty forty thousand dollars for a two-bedroom apartment. And so they have it as well in New York City. It's pretty wild. I mean that's like a five thousand dollar mortgage payment, right? Like if you're like, hey, I don't want to pay seven eight thousand dollars for two bedroom. I'm an incident by and I'm going to have to pay forty five hundred or five thousand dollars with eight percent interest rates on my mortgage like a million bucks.
Like yeah that if you're getting hit with the Mansion tax, it's pretty wild but yeah, New York. Has that New York gets you in so many different ways. It's a very challenging place to live because of that you live in here, right? I do live in New
York. Like what will it take for you to move? Basically
nothing like at this point. I'm not going to move I moved and I think that I've come to the realization that I'm willing to pay for the experience. Well, yes, the taxes are higher but I feel like the money that I give on those higher taxes is
Very much in exchange for the density of New York City The Experience like all of that and so to some degree. It's like the biggest expense I pay every year but it's because of the quality of life or specific type of quality of life that I want. And so I've just come to terms with it and like struck the check every year and compared to other cities New York does a half decent job of like making it feel like you're getting what you paid for, you know, you could Parks subway system, whatever but damn. It's still challenging.
Particularly, I mean you were in Florida for a while. I'm a Texas at the moment when I'm thinking about going to New York. I'm like golly this changes the math a lot the map changes at a significant amount it just close your eyes don't look
yeah. I got one. I got one more idea before we go, which
is AI agents. I don't know I sent you guys the link but this kit I don't know this guy Jacob Green Field we love because we love him. I don't know him either but he posts amazing stuff. He immediately is
Awesome in my book because he posted this yesterday and I was thinking like what we could talk about today and he basically used these AI agents which like that's all I know about them is they're called AI agents, but they like go and do these jobs and so he was like, all right, I'm gonna go have an AI agent that finds opportunities and I'm going to score the opportunities based on like how much money could I make and how difficult would it be to execute and he basically populated this whole list and then he's like, but haha. I'm going to create a second AI
agent that then goes and looks at all
of the opportunities that
Our high earning potential low difficulty
and I'm going to have them create a plan on how I could
actually execute to do that thing
and then he's probably gonna create like a third AI agent be like and then I'm gonna have them carry out the plans from AI agent number two,
but it's just like again. Yes, you have to be
technical to be able to figure some of this stuff out or work with technical people, but the world is changing at a very rapid pace and what we're seeing is everyone was worried about like the blue collar worker was going to get automated away like damn it. Sounds like Jacob is on.
I'm eating away my first Million by she could but no sudden.
No one has listened to the podcast. They just gonna get it like so sheet with
like, how do I get rich without doing a lot of work as
and go do those opportunities, right? So it's cool to see
but I do think that there's a lot of things that people are going to figure out here of just like how to find better opportunities without having to spend thousands of hours doing the research. This is awesome. This tweet is awesome. I'm looking at it. Now. This is very good.
They are also but also like like, okay, I like the I think the fits
One of these things where like the demo shows you what's possible but the Debo is not like usable in the I feel like you know the same way kind of about VR right now, like every time I buy the new VRI by the new VR every time it comes out and then I put it on I'm like, holy shit. This is amazing. I can't wait to show five other people this and then I'm going to put it on the shelf and not touch it for a year like but it soon this will be like this will be it'll solve all the pain points like, you know used to have to be Tethered to a computer now you don't it used to be where it was.
Ali hot and sweaty in there now it's not used to not be able to see the room when you're there. Now you can see through you can see the room like they're improving it one step at a time. Like for example, the things on this list
are you know, like clean
energy solutions for shipping innovating fuel are alternatives like okay. Yeah. Sure moneymaker. Got to read that last forever, you know, cool. Yeah. I
got you pop. Why isn't real estate blog on here not
enough money and way to do.
Where is real estate blog? It didn't make the top 30.
So I think the idea of this is really cool. But you know it practice like if somebody sat down was like great. I'm gonna do that thing. I'm gonna go use that thing to make it happen. I don't think any of its like usable at this point. I will give you one example that I think is
useful. So
I think somebody could do this right now. I think you know somebody who wants to play a different game could go play this game. I'll pork has like I don't know three or four billion dollars of gmv every year of people.
I basically paying for tasks that get done in up and I'm pretty sure a huge number of up work tasks and five or tasks are automatable right now or like maybe they're not 100% automated but like you could take that same person use, you know use a I use use use technology in order to be like 10 extra output 5 extra output so you can just like better leverage operational leverage. I think if somebody combined private equity
May I you could go roll up and by the top profiles on up work and fiver so you basically by the search juice that these guys have so that they're going to get the top like, you know logo design. You're going to go get the top jobs because you're the number one ranked because you were there since 2013 on Fiverr or whatever and I think you could go buy all of those and then you could put them all under one roof and be like, that's wild we're going
to use AI to fill a
huge number of these and you can make a lot of money because those little properties on
On top of fiber on top of up work those are valuable rental properties. Essentially they go get income every month. But now you have a way to get more margin out of that rental income. I think it already could buy them at a good price because nobody else is really buying those but on top of that you can probably get some more operational leverage out of
this was the whole idea that like through a CEO and other Amazon aggregators had was they were going to go buy up a bunch of Amazon stores, and I know somebody who financed a lot of them and his thesis was like if you're the first search result for a very popular product,
That is like real estate. And so it's like location location location. Like you are the first search result. And so you'll constantly get traffic. Obviously, there's platform risk if there's some sort of algorithm change or whatever, but they were able to kind of model out that risk. The hard part is like you're doing and physical Goods in on Amazon and what you're talking about is like you're basically just dealing with software and so there is 100% somebody some obscure place in the world who is like the best Fiverr logo designer right now and they are just like a mid Journey.
Like power user. All right, and so it's like okay I used to be able to design X number of logos per month. Now I can do 100 x that and oh you want to give me feedback? No problem. I'll just change the prompt to make it exactly what you want and I can do it in you know 1/100 of the time. Yeah, like that sounds awesome to that person and frankly, like that's how the world should work. Like you should pay the same for the results your by the result not the amount of work and
like that person.
After having figured out how to do it is going to be financially rewarded like we want that Financial or economic system to be exactly how business Works. Do you have all these companies that you're working on? How much time has are you allocating to each one? How many businesses do you have now?
I don't know how many but let's just call it like around 10.
I
think of it kind of a like a two by two Matrix to some degree. There are some businesses that are young and need lots of time. And then there are a lot of companies that are older and don't need as much time. The only thing that changes between those two things is like fires, right? So it's like if you look at my day, it is mostly distributed to the companies that are just getting off the ground. We're trying to figure out how to build momentum.
To get the profitability. We're trying to like figure out the first couple of hires. We're trying to like make sure we got the product correct, like all those types of things and then maybe twenty percent 15 percent of my day is like, oh we just lost a big customer or there's some like fire to put out with one of the companies that's already pretty mature. But after the
first I don't know six months, but the company works or it doesn't and if it works
then actually I'm probably doing the company of disservice if I'm like still meddling in the day-to-day like decision making and Leadership of the business. We have somebody who runs the company
any like they should be the ones to sink or swim and I think they appreciate the autonomy to just go do it themselves without you know, having me like micromanage them over their shoulder. The only thing that I do do is every week I get a weekly update and frankly like I read them, you know, I give a little bit of feedback here and there but it's more so for the people who run the company because it forces them just to write down when we get done this week and no one including myself ever wants to send an update. It's like we had nothing done. So that's really the only thing that's like persistent week in week out regardless of the
At the age of the business, how are you balancing the two things of a like by versus build? So I think Sean Andrew Wilkinson, they're toying around with the idea of buying parts of companies or wholly only owning companies that they buy as well as focus of all these one or two things could have outsized returns. I should only do those. Yeah. So buying first build is like really interesting. I've gone back and forth over the years like we've bought a couple of businesses not a lot but a few and we've obviously built a number of
them and you know, there's a sector right now that I'm looking at it's in the media space. It's very specific type of audience. I think that it's kind of a unique thing. I'm not usually big on Mike ideas or valuable this to me is just like we understand something about an audience that most other people haven't yet discovered. And so we think that it could be interesting to go after there's two players in the market that are well known in that industry again, it's a niche but also like very big and both players you'd probably have to pay like over a hundred million dollars to
Them in kind of total cost and you probably can't buy minority stake. And so it's like at this point given our track record. I probably could go try to figure out, you know, a bunch of these like big institutional investors who want to buy media businesses and like go put it together. It's a lot of work yet to convince someone to sell it to you. You have to get the terms right integration. Like there's a lot of challenges but then I'm like dude I think for 100 grand we could create a competitor and I guess I could be worth a hundred million dollars, you know within the first two or three years, but like could we like take a big?
Dent into their businesses probably so
when it's that skewed I obviously tend to lean towards building versus buying I think where it's harder is like, hey, the business is worth like 10 million dollars or five million dollars and you're like that's like two years of
progress versus
not spending the money up front and like maybe you get there. That's where I probably lean much more towards like buying first building. It's just like it's a lower risk and the deals easier to get done then
They go and you know by these huge things that you know, frankly, there's only so many people in the world that actually good at doing and what about the focus thing. I mean, I only do one thing I remember your face seared in my brain last time you asked me this and I was like, no I don't do a lot of things to do one thing. We provide capital and distribution to businesses think that's I think that's inspiring. I think that Sean and I fall on different sides. I actually think Shawn I'm slowly buying into other viewpoints.
Oh shit. I'm trying to go over to where you're at. I'm
to focus more Sam has their hold on a second This Is A Lie Sam, you have multiple businesses. Like you're not just doing one thing although you think of
like, I don't know Airbnb short term rental, right like you built that out. Like that's how you project that you were working on
right at the same time. You were
getting Hampton off the ground, right? Like there's all
these things where sometimes it's
not like, okay. I'm going to raise money and go build this big business. It could just be like projects, but you're constantly doing multiple things. I come Hobbies but II have a 40 hour.
Weak thing, which is actually some disproving my own point. It's actually podcasting and Hampton so that doesn't exactly make my point. But that's like my 9 to 5 and then like I got like weekend projects is how I consider it so meats and Par. He's a podcaster with we can have
like a simple answer content man
producer it content producer. I think well, I think we've got a really good job of rebranding that Creator just sounds
this week for some there's a bunch of people changing their ex bios right now. They're like
just deleting Creator and putting producer.
Oh, yeah. It just for some reason. It's a week. That's a week. That's a week that word. I don't know what it is, but we do need a Reaper and
that was just it bulk you in with everybody else. That's the problem like it's like, oh no, I'm I'm not like them. No, no that that guy's just unemployed. There's a difference, you know, I'm a different thing. I need to have in your name.
A guy who he was one of the early hires at palantir and he essentially like he didn't tell me this but like I think it was like basically the clo right or whatever in the early days and he was like a one of the cool things about the culture is like you kind of like jointly with your boss made up your title. And so his was like Risk identifier and Destroyer. It's just like man names do matter. Like what does that guy? Do? I want to work at the company where like that could be my
title and it's very
Inside the
organization what the president does it different companies may be different but the guy whose title is like Risk
identifier and Destroyer is 100% focused on risk. And so same thing like content creator, like maybe it's the wrong name and just change the name of
it and all the sudden everyone's really excited about
Tomas has a good story about this. He says when he was at Facebook, they were trying to hire like, you know, some PhD level math and stats guy and they were like cool like you can come be a data analyst. He's like, I don't want to be dating. I'm gonna go get my PhD instead. He's like,
I don't know does he do this data scientist? We have a new field called data science. And you're one of the first to be a data scientist on Earth and he's like, yeah, I invented the tag data science. And then now it's like, you know a whole like prestigious job title in Silicon Valley is to his data science.
Is that story true? That's that's all that's a hard story to believe is you think that's true.
Yeah, I believe it. I don't know. I've no reason not to believe it. I did. I love those
guys so much on the all in podcast, but I was laughing that people are
them shit about the using scare Meucci as a
measuring stick. You see this? Yeah, you know, it's like it's here scare Meucci was the White
House communications director. Oh, yeah. Yes, I think right. I mean like the infamous photo. He's got the sunglasses on with the finger guns, like probably one of the greatest stints in the White House of all time. Um, and people always tweet at scare Meucci like when you know, like Emmett Shearer was the CEO of open a.i. 48 Hours.
Like hey, how many scare
meucci's did he last Scaramouche who I calculated by
0.2?
Or whatever awesome and so the all in guys they've been saying it for a while and they were like, yeah, we invented
that there were like on Twitter I give us credit if you're going to use it and the internet loves to hate on those guys, if
you're not like the tech industry so they were like waiting for them to say something and of course they all sort of
pulling up like articles and whatever and like man, this is like
PEAK Internet right is like somebody
wants credit for a term that no one's really clear where it came
from and then a bunch of people who don't like that.
A person is wants to critique them and yell and scream and I go do a bunch of work to disprove them. I was like, we are all wasting our time. We should just get off the internet like go do productive things but kind of like when I when I say MFM we get credit for making Andrew huberman and Brian Johnson famous the longevity guy according to
us. Yeah. You're welcome World actually think that Kim Kardashian's famous because of you guys didn't want to do that early on. Yes. It's like you ever heard of Rob Dyrdek farewell.
The water work, I think
pop thanks for doing this man. We love hanging out with you. Absolutely. I appreciate you guys very much. Can I plug one thing before I leave? Yeah. Yeah, we have a job or is called dream startup jobs.com used to be called pop crypto jobs. I was just crypto. We've now expanded to be crypto and everything else. We've helped three people a day on average for now over two years get a new job. And so there's 10,000 open rolls on there if you want to get a job at your
Dream startup. You should go to dream sort of job.com and check it out. All right, appreciate it looks good. I remember what it used to be. I think this is a this is a smart move. Well, we'll figure it out. I appreciate you fellas. Good to see you man. That's the
Pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all into it like all Days on the
Road Less Traveled never looking back.
