The New WeWork, How to Make $10M In 3 Months, and More
And his verification is for $100 million liquid plus. And so the guy has over $100 million and he did it all through 2 or 3 of these apps. And I believe with close to no employees and he did it over around like 8 or 10 years. What up?
What up? They told us to do intros now. Of the podcast. So this is My First Million, the podcast where, uh, we tell you 100 good ideas, half are good, half are bad, but it's on you to figure out which ones. This is My First Million where I make fun of Sam about how he talks. He makes fun of me about how I look. And in between we squeeze in a few business ideas. Let's see what else, what else we got for him.
And supposedly, uh, we're supposed to be successful people. So it's like the reviews people say, they say it's kind of like we're just sitting at a bar with a bunch of our successful friends, dare I say— I hate this word, right— multimillionaire friends, and just hear what they talk about.
But that, uh, just a couple of deca-millionaires hanging out on the pod, dude. Um, yeah, how are we supposed to brag about that? You know what I learned from, from my last successful venture? I now take those learnings to the podcast.
Can I just say that regardless of the Deca Millionaire nonsense, I did something a few weeks ago that I think was amazing. I bought a $60 tattoo gun on Amazon and I let my wife give me a hand tattoo instead of wearing a wedding ring. Oh wow, totally worth it.
Uh, let me be the judge. Can you bring that a little closer here? What is it?
It's just an X. Can you see?
Is it right? Like, that's not focusing. Okay, it's an X.
Like, you know, it's an infected X, but it's an X.
You know, like where, where something was there, then it's like dead, and now you've like put an X there. That's kind of the vibe you're going for, or what?
Yeah, or like, you know, triple X on like a moonshine whiskey jug. Yeah, something like that.
And she wanted to do this, or you want to do this? She seems more sensible than you, so I don't know.
Yeah, of course she didn't want to do this. I just said, Sarah, I bought this tattoo gun. Sit down right now or otherwise I'm just gonna do it myself.
Ah, okay.
Threats.
And I handed her an orange. She raged and threats.
Yeah. Like it literally, I set it up and within 2 minutes it was done. I handed her an orange. I go, write an X on that orange. Great. Now do that on my fist.
People always ask us what's the secret to being a Deca Millionaire? And we tell 'em it's threats. You gotta threaten your, your business partners. Your marital partners, you've got to threaten all your partners. Actually, Sam, you, you, you kind of do use this sort of like, I wouldn't call it threat, but as they say in It's Always Sunny, um, it's the implication of danger. I feel like you do use this, the implication of things going wrong. Am I, am I right about that?
What's an example?
In your management style, like, you know, uh, you're trying to get the team motivated. You have two paths you could go down. You could, you could start with why and tell them why you're so excited about this, why this is good for them. Or you could just hit them with a, with a solid threat, with the implication of things not going so well if we don't do X. Which way do you go?
I like the second one. I'm more of a guy who will do like, if, if I can— all right, tell me how you are. If you can make $1 million or not lose $1 million, which one are you more motivated to do?
For me, not lose a million dollars. And I think for you, the same.
Same. Absolutely same. It's not to do something. So I love setting my life up and I do this all the time with like my wife and stuff. I'd be like, oh shit, like I already booked it. Like we already, we, we gotta do this thing. Or, uh, you know, I always set stuff up that if I don't do it, there's consequences. That's the way to live, man. And I used to do that with my employees all the time. And you know what? They always said they hated it. And then whenever they leave and quit, eventually they'll say something like, yeah, but I did so much cool shit and we actually got a lot of stuff done. So I think people actually like it.
Right. Yeah. They tell their therapist as they spend years recovering from you.
Yeah, I guess so. Dude, can we— do you have a bunch of topics?
I got a few. Yeah.
I got a couple too. Can I start on one that like, I think it's blowing my mind. And I, so basically yesterday I went on a long walk. I did, I went on like a 10-mile walk. You ever go on a long walk?
I go on a walk. I got a dog.
Yeah. Oh yeah. I just went on a really long walk and I went and walked around all these fancy neighborhoods in Brooklyn and I started, you know, I do what, what people do. I pull up Zillow as I'm walking and I'm like, you know, I wonder what it's like to live here. And the houses that I like, what I usually will do is I see a house and I go, oh, I would like to live there. And I pull it up and it's $8 million. And $8 million, that's one number. But then you actually look at how much money you need to come up on at closing, and then you look at how much money you need to spend each and every month on the mortgage and on your interest and on maintenance and things like that. And I started thinking, I think I'm going to live over here in Brooklyn, and I wanted to like map out how much money I would expect I would spend to live the lifestyle I want to spend. And it is astronomical. And I want us to talk about some, some of those expenses. You want to talk about something?
How much? Walk me through it.
Okay. So listen to this. First of all, I'm going to talk about the life that I'm going to live when I move to Brooklyn and all the listeners, there's going to be a bunch of them that's going to say, oh, Sam, no one needs an $8 million house. Yeah, I get it. You know, like all I need is like a bucket of water and like some apples and like a pair of Crocs and I'm happy. But this is the life that I choose to live. So like, I get it, no one needs this, but I'm picking this. So get off my back on this hypothetical case that might be a reality in 2 years. So I just gotta get that outta the way. But in terms of hypotheticals, it's not entirely hypothetical because I went and talked to a couple friends who do this. But listen to this shit. So I found a home that I wanted to buy and I actually linked to it on the, the MBD Master doc. Okay. So it's a StreetEasy, it's on StreetEasy. It's a nice house. Okay. It's only 3,000 square feet though, but it's a brownstone in my favorite neighborhood of Cobble Hill. It's $5 million. I actually think the range of things I want are between $5 and $8, but this one I just found, it was available. It's $5 million, which basically means I got to come up with $1.1 million as my down payment. And then I'm going to spend around $20,000 a month in mortgage and interest and things like that, not including maintenance, which is going to be more expensive. It's going to be probably another $2,000 or $3,000 a month. Then I think it would probably cost on the low end $50,000, on the middle only end of like $150,000 to furnish it the way I'd like to furnish it. Right. Have you ever furnished a house?
Yeah. Yeah. It depends if you go like, like my wife, she's like, oh yeah. I'm like, what do you like? She's like Restoration Hardware. I'm like, ah, geez. Like, you know, every item in the store is like, you know, $4,000 to $10,000. And so, you know, you just add that up per room, you're putting in like $20,000 to $25,000 worth of stuff per, per room, uh, in the house, which is pretty nuts.
Yeah, totally. So like $150,000 is, that's just kind of what it would cost if you want to go that route. If you want to go West Elm, West Elm, then yeah, you're, you can maybe get it done for $175,000, but it's quite expensive. Then if I'm going to get this fat house, I'm getting it because I have 2 kids or a couple of kids. So I need my $40,000, $50,000 a year nanny. I imagine I would spend around $30,000 a year in food. And so basically it comes up to where I think I'm spending $600,000 to $700,000 a year to live the life I want to live in Brooklyn. But here's the kicker. If you're making over $1 million a year in Brooklyn, or, or for sure in Manhattan, it's even more than this. Half your money goes away to taxes. So basically if I'm spending around $600,000 a year, I need to make $1.2 million just to cover my, my monthly nut.
Break even.
Just to break even. And if I, if it's, and, and I, I talked to two friends, one friend who lives in Brooklyn, he told me that he spends around $500,000 a year. And then another friend that also lives nearby and he told me he spends $800,000 a year and he spent me, he sent me his, uh, list, but he goes, I have an, uh, an additional house in North, uh, Rhode Island. But if you take that vacation home, we are spending around $650,000 a year. So to live like this, it's crazy. And when you go and walk on these streets, you know, there's a house every block. If you go in Manhattan, there's this fancy apartment every block. How on earth do you think people— so many people afford this? It's crazy. Like when you actually think about the logistics, right?
Well, Well, a lot of the people who own these homes, they own them before they were worth $5 million. So go look at the, you know, the Zillow history of this thing 10 years ago. What was this home worth? You know, I'm guessing it's less than, you know, less than half this, maybe 35% of this price 10 years ago, 30%. And so you're, what you're talking about here is like, you know, a home that, what, that they bought in, their basis is a million, million and a half dollars, something like that instead of 5. So now the monthly payment is less and now the property taxes are less. And so, you know, you cut out your biggest expense in this case. Um, you, you trim that down. So I think that's, that's the answer for how a lot of people have this is inheritance or, um, or buying in, you know, 20 years ago, 15 years ago when these were worth a fraction of what they're worth today. And so that's why they can afford to kind of live above their weight.
Well, so I had 4 takeaways when I started thinking about this. The first was that there's a story behind everything. So all these people, like a simpleton like me, is like, oh, you just got to earn this much money. And they did it by starting a business. It's like, no, that's not the reality. And Zach Crockett, who works at The Hustle, he basically— we were talking about this and he was going to write a story on this. And he said that he researched a bunch of these homes. And what he did was he, for all the $5 million brownstones, for a bunch of $5 million brownstones in NYC, he used a tool called Melissa and he looked up the property records. Then he Googled the names of each person who, quote, owned it. And then he like looked at their family records, which he just did this all through just sleuthing and like looking through stuff. And he found out that a bunch of them, like 7 out of 10 of them, were like teachers or artists or, or, or a professor, things that you basically like, you can earn a bunch of money, but you're not earning enough money to buy this home. And what he surmised and came to the conclusion was like, they just get a lot of help. And so like, it's hard to own a $5 million brownstone when you're a reporter at the New York Post or some like, you know, $120,000 a year job. So I think there's a story behind everything. The second thing is I think you just have to earn a lot of money, dude. Listen to this. If you earn, uh, uh, one—
hang on, hang on. That was a killer insight.
What?
The— you gotta earn a lot of money? Yeah. Where'd you come up with that?
That you gotta earn a lot of money. But listen, let's, let's put the math on this. How many, how many years do you think you need to, uh, how long would it take you to save $10 million if you lived in New York?
To save $10 million?
Yeah. To get a portfolio of $10 million.
Uh, I have no idea. I don't know. Let's say 20 years.
Okay. So if you make $1.5 million and you're spending around $25,000 a month in living expenses, it's going to take you around 15 years to be able to save $10 million, which is pretty crazy. Now you've gotta figure out how to earn at least $1.5 million for 10 years or for 13 years, which is like, that in itself is impossible or not impossible. Very, very, very challenging.
And so the— hold on. Your fir— your first thing was like, these people are teachers and artists and you said they gotta have some help. You're talking about like family help. You're not talking about like, there's nothing else, right? You're saying you have rich family.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Sorry.
I think, I think that, I think just having a ri— like I underestimated that. When I think about this, I'm like, whose parents would give them $2 million for a down payment on a home? And I think the answer to that is actually a lot. I can't, I can't imagine that, but the, like that, that was hard for me to, cause you know, I don't fucking know that my mom and dad, like the best gift they ever gave me was when I turned 21, they gave me $1,000 and that was like the last birthday present I ever got.
I don't even think it's a down payment. Cause okay. You're a teacher. Great. Your down payment is covered. Where are you coming up with $25K a month of your monthly, monthly payment just for your home.
Like, I think they get an allowance.
I think they're— this is a, this is an all cash. Here's your house free and clear. You get to live here and you cover your life expenses. If you're paying for a latte, that's you. But, uh, I'll buy you this brownstone. I think that's gotta be what it is.
I think that's it. That, that has to be what it is. Or the second thing is you got to earn a lot. The third thing is I think you gotta— I wonder how many of them do you think sell a business? I think earning a lot, like a big nut of $10, $20 million. It seems like impossible to do without selling an asset.
You got to be in finance, law, um, maybe medicine or consulting to be pulling in a million dollars a year of income. I don't think there are many other jobs that do that. We're not talking about athletes, entertainers, because that's just a small— such a small portion of the population. But of jobs that a normal person can get that's going to make you $1 million to $2 million a year, I'm pretty sure you gotta be either a banker or banker or consultant if you're employed, or you gotta be self-employed as a doctor or a lawyer or something like that to be able to pull that in. So that's like, am I missing one?
That's like, those are non— those are, yeah, those are non-entrepreneurial jobs. Like the other way. And then you could start your own business.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You own a small business, you own a big business, you, um, you know, you own a contracting firm, you do construction around the city, whatever it is. Those are the other way where you can do this. And that's usually, you know, not earning some steady $1.5 million per year. You're earning like nothing, nothing, nothing, a lot, a lot, a lot, huge. And then back to nothing, you know, like that sort of thing. It's this, it's this lumpy curve that an entrepreneur has where you're basically broke till you're very un-broke. Um, so yeah, but am I, uh, yeah. What else you got to say about this?
And my third and final takeaway here is basically There's so much out there. There is so much money out there. There is so much opportunity. You walk by all these places and again, Ben's laughing at me. This is obvious, but when you see it in real life, I walk down the street and I'm like, oh, that apartment that costs $12,000 a month to rent in that top floor of that brown store, Soan, and there's 3 of those in there. So like there's 3 people each paying $12,000 and they're just like, home, home, home, home, home, home, home. Astronomical. There's just so much money out there to be made. It's just so much opportunity. So anyway, I did this 3-hour walk yesterday and I just, I felt enlightened and I just wanted to come to the table and fill you in on that. Nothing, nothing, nothing, um, spectacular.
Well, that's why, uh, I'm glad you started the show with something unspectacular. Uh, that's why, you know, these TikToks that are like, they stop somebody in a fancy car or a fancy house and they go, Hey, I just want to know, what do you do for a living? And the guy's like, um, and they're like, you know, first of all, like, is this like a trap? Are you like an IRS agent? What is this? And they're like, uh, I paint houses. Or they'll be like, you know, I, um, I work in real estate. Uh, uh, you know, I work in the financial services industry. And it's like, oh, okay, what's going on here? But I think the reason those are popular is because wealth for most people is a complete mystery. It is a complete black box unless you come from wealth. If you come from wealth and you grow up and at your, you know, you're going to 15th birthday parties where like Serena Williams is there to play tennis with the other kids, you're like, what the hell? Like, you know, this is— everything is just nice. Everybody goes, we summer in the Hamptons. You have a place where you summer, like summering is a verb. And then you, you know, you know that your— oh my godfather, you know, he's— he owns like 44 dental practices.. And so you, if you grow up with wealth, usually you, wealth doesn't seem like this mysterious, unattainable thing. You, in fact, you realize there's like a thousand paths and it's up to you to decide which one you want. But for most people, wealth is like kind of just this mysterious thing. You don't even see how wealthy people live. You don't hear like the numbers you talked about. I think for a lot of people listening, they're gonna be like, what in the hell is Sam talking about? Somebody pays $500,000, $800,000 a year of just their living expenses. Like, that sounds like the most money you could make, let alone spend per year. And so when you're talking about spending more than a person's life savings in a year, that's, I think, very foreign to people. Then you say, okay, well, how do you achieve that? And now you have maybe one example, two examples. You don't have like 25, 35, 45 examples to choose from. And so I think that's why those TikTok channels are popular. I think that's why this podcast is popular because you either react to this type of information with one of two reactions: bitterness or inspiration. For most people, it's bitterness. You hear about other people's success or their extravagant spending and you get bitter. You see the difference between what they do and what you do, and you don't focus on the fact that maybe you want to do it. Instead, you focus on the fact that they're wrong, evil, unnecessary, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. And how, you know, they only could have got it by, by sort of cheating the system or some unfair advantages. And you get bitter. And that's where I would say 90% of people fall into the bitter camp. But some people, they hear those stories and they take inspiration. And if you take inspiration, you start to collect each of these anecdotes. You start to collect each of these data points and you say, oh, I'm taking this foggy map that I have, this cloudy map where I couldn't really see. And I'm just pushing away the fog. I'm getting clarity on, wow, there's a thousand ways to win. And wow, winning, it can be a lot bigger than I even imagined. And once you sort of have that in your head, that's when things become a lot easier because you start to notice all around you examples of people building wealth in unique ways and ways that are not always long and hard, ways that are not always painful or require genius. You'll start to see examples of somebody who does it by, you know, simply like, you know, starting a mushroom farm in California and it's like, yeah, that's what they do. Or. Somebody— I remember I met a guy who created the tread that goes on treadmills. He's like, yeah, we're a tread manufacturer. I was like, what? And he's like— and these guys would do like $15 million a year in sales. And was he a marketing genius? No. Was he a sales genius? No. He just simply was like, oh, there's demand for tread that goes on conveyor belts, treadmills.
How much profit do you think?
I mean, I don't know. I was like, I was like in 5th grade at the time. I remember it was my friend's dad. And I was like, why is Jordan so rich? And it was like, oh, Jordan's rich because Jordan's dad sells treads on treadmills. And then we met these other people that were rich and I was like, again, I wasn't even asking the question, but I remember my sister saying something like, yeah, they have mushroom farms. And I remember being like, in my head, farmers don't make tons of money. And then I realized pretty quickly, oh, farmers can make a ton of money. But I was just Slowly collecting these anecdotes only when I was in my 20s. And I was like, if I want to know how to get rich, then I need to know like a lot more examples of richness. And if I want to get rich fast, and I need to get examples of people getting rich fast. And, um, and this is actually a good transition. We have a friend who is, we were just in the group chat. Uh, we have a friend who it seems like might get rich very quickly here.
Richer.
Uh, let me explain richer. They created a product or a service or an app. And they, every day they're posting a chart of like the growth of this thing. And it's like an early version of a hockey stick. It's like, yep, we went from doing $100 a day, $500 a day, $1,000 a day today, $3,000 a day. Today's gonna be $9,000 a day pretty quickly. Like, you know, fast forward 2 weeks, this person's gonna put a chart in there. That's gonna show them doing $200,000 in revenue just today. And it's gonna be, nothing has changed. It's just, they just let the growth carry on. And you see that and you're like, wow, that's, that's winning. Like, that's the HOV lane. That's the fast lane where you could just go in and you could win faster. Like, geez, I didn't realize that. I thought I gotta bust my ass for 10 years. And the reality is this person has been busting their ass for 10 years, building up the skills so that they can launch a new product. And they can do, let's call it 5 to 10 million this year in, in potential profits. Now this person, if you remember, uh, many months ago, and they told us, they told us this exact, this exact thing. They go, yeah, I'm just thinking about ideas that can make, I forgot what they said, 10 or $50 million. I wanna make $10 million in a year, $50 million in a year. And I was like, okay, like, you know, yeah, sure. I, you know, and I want Jessica Alba to, you know, add me on Snapchat right now. Like, but it's not necessarily gonna happen. Like, you could just say it. But he was like, no, I've been studying. There's apps that do that in the App Store.
And he's like showing us 3 examples.
Yeah. Yeah. Just showing us screenshots and examples. It's like, that does that. Yeah. This does that. Yeah. And you, now you see 10 of 'em and all of a sudden First of all, I never knew somebody who even stated a goal like that. So just hearing it for the first time was like, that's interesting. I knew people that would say, I wanna build a huge company, a billion-dollar company. That was normal. I'd heard that before. I'd heard, uh, I wanna get a high-paying job. You know, I wanna make, you know, $500K a year at, at this company. I've heard that before. I had never really heard somebody be like, I'm looking for a way that I can make $10 million in 3 months. That was actually the exact thing. It was, how do I make $10 million in 3 months?. And so I was like, all right, well, never heard that. That was new. Then I thought, well, my brain doesn't come up with any examples of how to do that. That's like, you know, doesn't involve, you know, putting a ski mask on and walking into a Wells Fargo. So like, you know, and then he gave me 10 examples. And so I was like, okay, well now I got 10 examples. Number 11 doesn't seem so far-fetched at that point. And I remember coming to and talking to you and being like, Dude, have you heard anybody think like this, talk like this, come up with ideas like this? Because I believe that there's great power in questions. And I had never really heard somebody ask the question, how do I make $10 million in the next 3 months? And once that question was asked, now my brain has to start coming up with answers. And at first my brain was struggling. And then as he gave me examples, it started to get better and better and better and come up with examples about how you might do that. And now it's literally happening. Like that right in front of us scenario is actually playing out right in front of us. What do you think of this?
I think it's awesome. I think, I think it's still too early. I think anything that comes fast will go away fast or can go away fast. But he called his shot and we are seeing on a daily basis whether it's come, it's coming. It is in fact now coming into reality. And I think it's awesome. I think that there's ways, I think Peter Thiel said it where he's like, what's your 5-year goal? And then someone says their goal and he says, cool, how can you do that in 6 months? So I usually believe in that. This guy took it even further, which is what's your 5-year goal? Do it in 3 months. And it's awesome. And there's another guy who I know that's done this and he's public. His name is Alan Wong. Do you have the, uh, the, the app on your iPhone that lets you listen to police scanners? It's like the police scanner app.
No, but I know, I know of these apps.
These are, it's like weird. Yeah, it's like 5-0 radio app, I think, like 5-0 radio app. And this, this guy, Alan Wong, he posted in Reddit in 2013 and he basically said, um, uh, he said, hey, I'm Alan Wong. I was told to create an AMA here.
I have it up here.
Yeah. You want to, you want to read it or you read it?
I have it up here. He goes, yeah, he goes, I'm a per— ask me anything. I'm a person in his 20s who went from rags to riches during the recession. He goes, how I did it. I develop apps. My most popular app is called the Five-O Radio Police Scanner. It lets you listen to police chatter around the world. You've probably seen this used in the latest Spider-Man movie, although they rebranded it. Uh, and as of 2012, my apps have been downloaded by 20 million people. By the way, this is 10 years ago he wrote this. So he did this in the 2008, 2009.
Well, I have an update on it that I can give you in a, in a second.
So, so he goes, my parents were raised in the slums of China. They fled here with my brother to New York. My mother worked in a sweatshop in Chinatown before she quit and became a homemaker. My father was an herbalist before he passed away unnaturally 3 months after I graduated from college. After his passing, no one in my family had a job. Uh, and so he says, I found a full-time job at Columbia University. I was the only one with income, so I taught myself how to create apps in my free time, and I created apps on the weekends with hopes of making some side income. I didn't expect this to make me millions. And then he says, uh, where does he say his money? I don't think he says his money somewhere here, but, uh, yeah, go ahead. Fill in the gaps when it says.
So he doesn't say it there, but I found it. So there's this other subreddit that I talk about all the time called FatFire, and they've got this particular type of flair called verified by the mods, where the mods, the moderators, look at the income or your balance sheet. They look at something and they say, yeah, we believe it. What you are saying is true. And his verification is for $100 million liquid plus. And so he, the guy has over $100 million and he did it all through 2 or 3 of these apps, and I believe with close to no employees, and he did it over around like 8 or 10 years.
It's a— he, by the way, he says, so he has 3 apps. He has Five-O Radio, then he has Police Scanner Plus, and then he has one more called— what is it called? Um, hang on. He's got 3 apps. That were in the top, like the top 100. So, so he goes, this means I'm the only person ever in App Store history. This is what he wrote at the time. This was back in, I don't know, 2012, 2013, something like that. That I'm the only person in history to have in the, in the app, uh, to have 3 apps in the App Store that were top 10 overall in the paid and free categories at the same time.
Yeah, man, this guy's cool. And then he, if you Google his username, it's Rego Apps. So R-E-G-O Apps and then FatFire. You'll see his post from FatFire and he talks about what it's like to be different tiers of rich. And he has all types of, of like, you know, when I was at this thing, this is how I felt. When I was at this other thing, this is how I felt. And now, according to his flair, it's over $100 million. So this is— so you're asking, who else do I know that's done this? I don't know this guy and I can't verify that any of this is true, but it's pretty interesting and it might be true.
Well, yeah. And I don't know the speed that this guy did it, but still amazing. By the way, we should get verified in Fatfire. Why aren't we posting in Fatfire? That seems like a— that's our— those are our people. We should hang out.
I do post there. I post there under a name that no one knows me as, but I would post there more. Would you post? Do you use this?
Yeah, I'll go browse. I never post, never comment, but I'll make an account and I'll— let's do it. Let's get verified. Let's do an AMA there.
Yeah. So look, this guy's thing says I fat— I found his username. He goes, I fat-fired at age 25. I make $10 million a year in my 30s. $10 million plus a year in my 30s. And I have over $100 million according to— which has been verified for the mods. And here, this is what he says. Someone says, what's the difference in millionaires or in money levels? He goes, at $100K to $1 million, you can tip very generously and be okay with that. At $1 to $5 million, you can fund some medical expenses and maybe a college college tuition or two, maybe for an extended family member or friend. At $5 to $20 million, you could pay off a handful of college tuitions. I guess they're asking about donation. You can pay off a handful of college tuitions and some expensive surgeries. And then he jumps to, uh, $50 to $50 million. You can create several nonprofits and overseas that, uh, that are overseas and help people, uh, at a community level, like building a school or a local community or something. So he like talks about this constantly throughout this subreddit and it's very, very interesting.
Yeah, that's cool. I like that. Uh, that's a good story. I, um, I, uh, I'm gonna have another story to share on this in, let's call it, 30 days. Let's say I'm gonna call— I'm gonna leave that little seed here. 30 days, I'll have another interesting story to share on this topic. But let's switch to something else. A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool?
A billion dollars.
Let's talk about, um, this guy Scott Painter. Do you know who Scott Painter is? This is my, this is my Billy of the week. This is guy Scott Painter. I don't know if he's a Billy, but he's got that big Billy energy for sure. And I'm gonna tell you this guy's story and you're gonna be, you're gonna be amazed by this guy.
All right, go for it.
Do you know who I'm talking about? Do you know who, have you ever heard this name before?
No, I'm just looking it up now.
So Scott Painter is known because he was the CEO of something called TrueCar. And so TrueCar is like a super successful— it was like one of the super successful early car companies on the internet. So what they were doing was they were publishing price information so that you could go and figure out, you know, what the true price of this car is so that, you know, before you would go to a dealership, And depending on which dealer you went to and which salesperson you talked to and what, how they sort of sized you up as a sucker, you would get like a 30% price differential on the price of the same car. So you could go to one place and the same exact car, they'll, they'll charge you, um, you know, 30% more or less depending on, uh, which place you went. So there's a huge spread. After TrueCar, people could just go figure out, well, this is the price of this car. A 1997, you know, Mazda Miata is supposed, with this many miles, is supposed to be this price.. And in every market they would go into, the price gaps that, that dealers were charging would spread, would change from 30% down to like 3%. And so they were like helping bring in price transparency. But this dude has a crazy story. He has built, he has basically spent like 20 years just constantly trying to reinvent the auto industry online. So this guy did, uh, I'm just gonna read you like his, his LinkedIn. So he's, um, he's the, he starts off, Well, he goes to the Army first of all, and he is a Spanish interrogator, which is just like a kind of a crazy little path that he took. And he talks about like, you know, why he went there is like, you know, my, you know, dad wasn't so cool. I needed freedom. Army was freedom for me. So I went to the Army. And, um, so anyways, he get, he goes and he becomes VP of marketing at 1-800-CarSearch. This is early internet. We're talking like 1999 basically. And so there's 1-800-CarSearch. 1-800-DENTIST. He's like the VP of marketing for each. Then he creates like a consult. So he's just hopping one year, one year after another. He creates Dental Advantage. It's like consulting for dentists about how to use the internet. Then he starts another one called Vision Incorporated. This again, 1999-ish. And he's like, um, helping companies transform, like for e-commerce, like, hey, companies are gonna need to do e-commerce. I'm gonna help them do this. So he, he was right. He was just way early on, on this trend of e-commerce. And then he just starts this like crazy run in the car industry. So he goes, The, he's the founder of CarsDirect. They go from $0 to $650 million in sales in year 1. Then he goes, he starts, uh, he starts Advertising.com. Yeah. Then he's CEO and founder of TrueCar. Then he's CEO and founder of Pricelock, which was like, uh, lock in your like gas prices. Then he was the founder. Then after, so he's, he does TrueCar, he takes it public and he gets on this crazy scenario where he is the, uh, I think he's the largest individual shareholder. He's not only the largest shareholder, he's buying up a ton of stock. He believes in the stock like crazy. They have an earnings miss, like the economy sort of turns, car owners, people start slow down with their car buying. They have a big quarter miss, stock drops like crazy. He gets margin called because he was buying so much of his own stock and he's basically forced to borrow money from friends to pay off his margin call. And he resigns from the company that same month. He basically has to step down as CEO. He lost a ton of money on his own stock. He gets a divorce and his literal house burns down. And what does he do the following week? The following week, he incorporates Fair.com, a new way to buy cars. And this was like basically the idea that like, hey, car buying is super, super complicated. You go, you buy a car. I don't know if you've ever done it, but like the process of you have to buy a car, you have to qualify for financing. Like, you know, 80% of cars are financed in the United States. No, nobody buys cars all cash here. And, um, and then you have like this complicated, like credit check payment thing. Then you have your, your insurance on top. You have your title insurance, you have to do the right registration. You have to do all this different stuff. And he is like, what if instead it was like, you know, what if buying a car was as simple as like buying a coffee or Netflix, like subscription? So what he would do is you would just put in your phone number. It would like find out all your information. It would, and it would say, what car do you want? You pick a car and it'd be like, cool, that car's $500 a month. And you own that car and you could turn it in at any time if you don't want that car. So it's like a long-term rentals basically was what Fair was doing. Fair grows like crazy. They raise hundreds of millions of dollars because, A, this guy has got this crazy track record. B, he's very like kind of charismatic and formidable. Like you see this guy as a founder, you're like, God, I would hate to be competing against this guy in the same market. And he thinks very big. He's like, you know, we're going to change the way that car ownership is done. We're gonna make this faster, cheaper, whatever. SoftBank piles in $300 million into a Series B round and, um, and they're on their way and fare ends up going up really fast and then crashing really fast because, uh, the few years ago, I don't know if you know, but basically like the, yeah, as the tech markets, like valuations turned, SoftBank was, was, was the big whale in this space, started losing money. They lost money on WeWork, then they lost money on, uh, what was the other big one? SoftBank had like, I don't know, 3 or 4 like huge things like Uber. Like they had a huge bunch of huge things going like prices crashed from where they had invested. And so he couldn't raise any more money and he had built this like very complicated thing. They lay off 40% of people. Affair doesn't really work out. And now he's back again because I see this thing that says this new startup Autonomy has placed $400 million worth of purchase orders to buy 8,000-something Teslas this year. I was like, what? Who is buying 8,000 Teslas? Who is paying $400 million to buy Teslas. And it's a startup called Autonomy that is trying to make it where you can just rent electric cars simply. Like you, you, you, there's a lot of people that want to own a electric car, like a Tesla, and, um, they can't afford it. It's too expensive all in. So here, pay this monthly fee and you get to rent a Tesla. You get to own, you basically, you get to like have a Tesla. You're not renting it like day by day. It's a long-term rental. He's back. And so they placed $1 billion of purchase orders across different electric vehicle manufacturers to do this. So he's, he's back. He must have raised a ton of money again, plus raised a bunch of debt. And, uh, he's back with his new startup, Drive Autonomy. And this guy is fascinating. I went down a rabbit hole listening to interviews with this guy.
How did he come under your radar?
Interesting dude. Because of this autonomy thing. I worked backwards from the last thing I told you where I was like, But what—
why were you just looking up purchase orders of electric cars?
I saw it too. I saw a tweet, you know, you follow on Twitter, like, you know, Elon and a bunch of like these like kind of Tesla fanboy and Tesla hater accounts. Like, I follow both sides. Like, there's basically a huge group of people that are— I should actually say it's a small group of people that believe Tesla is a giant fraud and is going to zero. They're called Tesla Q. And then there's other people that believe that Elon Musk is, you know, the second coming of Jesus and I follow both. And in the second coming of Jesus camp, they were like, Tesla, you know, this huge— you know, here's more good news for Tesla. These guys, Drive Autonomy, has placed $400 million of orders for Teslas because there's so much demand. And Elon had replied saying, um, he was like, demand has never been the problem, it's supply. Like, manufacturing, like, production of cars is our problem. Like, yeah, this is good news, but like, we don't have a demand problem. We have so much demand, we have supply problem. But I, I was curious, where is this, you know, half a billion dollars of demand coming from? I've never heard of this startup before. What do they do? And, um, and that's what they do.
What, what was he like when you hear him talk? Is he charismatic? He just looks like a, uh, a normal white dude.
Very charismatic. Very matter of fact. Um, so he's basically like, he's a good storyteller. He's quick and to the point. He, um, he reminds me a lot of like, you know, that other guy we like, Frank Slootman, the guy who runs Snowflake, who wrote that amazing blog post. Amp It Up, which basically describes like, you know, don't be such a wuss. Like, you know, run your company to win and we're here to win. And like, this is the plan to win. And, uh, that guy's just been like a serial CEO of companies that just grow really fast. This guy's like that. Um, so let me tell you some of the kind of like interesting little nuggets that came out of this. So I'm just going to keep rambling on this guy. So he's basically, he's like, uh, he's like, I'm a multi-time college dropout. Like I have dropped out of college multiple times. I dropped out of like, I dropped out of my kind of prep college. I dropped out of undergrad. I dropped out of grad school. And he's like, I basically had a ton of failure. You guys know me because I've tried like 25 things and 3 have worked. And he's like, but that's entrepreneurship. You need 3 to work out of 25 in a 20-year career. And that's what winning looks like. He's like, I always loved cars. He goes, cars are a where am I at in life purchase. He goes, I can just look at a car that I owned and it would tell me a story about where I was in life. When I'm graduating, right? I'm coming of age, or when I moved, or when I got my first good job, or whatever. He's like, a car basically marked each chapter. He's like, that's how it is for most people. I kind of had that insight, which is like, a car is like your avatar that you use when you go around the world. A car says something about you. And, uh, you know, when you, when you go upgrade to the minivan, it's cuz you're going into family mode. And like, that's what I kind of realized. He goes, people spend a crazy amount of money on cars cuz in the interview the guy's like, how have you been able to raise so much money? He goes, well, I play in like the biggest market. He goes, 15% of all people's gross income goes to mobility, half in buying their car and half into fuel taxes, repairs, insurance, et cetera. He's like, so when you have this thing that makes up 15% of what everybody makes, Or just put differently, like, I think it's like a third of your net worth, you know, if people are spending on new— when they buy a new car, he's like, the TAM is just enormous. Like, you know, it's like $5 billion, $5 trillion a year goes into cars or something insane like that. So he's like, you know, that's the easy answer to how I raised so much money. I went and played in this big space and then I tried to reinvent it at every— every time I would do one, I would try to reinvent it. So he's like, you know, we were the first ones to be like, we put the upfront price of a car on the internet. Nobody was doing that at their— in the early days. I think that's the Cars Direct.
Is he successful? You said that he got margin called. Does that mean he was broke?
Uh, it doesn't necessarily mean he was broke. It means he didn't have enough collateral for like what he borrowed for his stock. Now, if the stock recovered, which I don't know, I haven't looked at TrueCar stock.
TrueCar, their market cap is $230.
Million. Yeah, that's, that's, yeah, it doesn't, does not look like it has, uh, done very well since then. So, uh, yeah, it's like basically, you know, a third of where it was back in 2014. So yeah, that's, that's not doing so well. Um, and he says that in his thing, he's like, I've, he's like, I made a bunch and I've lost it all many times over. Um, and so, you know, I'm sure this guy's done well. Like, I, I don't think you can build multiple companies that get valued at billions of dollars, take a company public. I don't think you can do that. And like, you got a real— you got to be like kind of really fucking reckless to walk away with less than, you know, $20 million at the end of all that.
Dude, I love people who do. But anyway, swings, even if they miss like consistently or like, you know, in this guy's case, like he didn't entirely miss. He did actually build some amazing things, but like maybe it was just shy of what it could have been. Another guy who's doing that right now, tell me what you think about him. Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork, he just raised $250 million in seed funding for a $1 billion apartment business. I don't exactly know what the business does, but it sounds like it's WeLive, the thing that we talked about where you, you know, it's like fancy apartment buildings that are all mostly the same. You pay a premium because it's all predesigned and looks really nice and it has a community on it, which honestly I think is awesome. I also think WeWork is awesome. What do you think about a guy like Adam Neumann taking another swing? Our software is the worst.
See, most CRMs are a cobbled-together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous.
I think I love our new CRM.
Our software is the best.
HubSpot. Grow better. I think it's great. I think it's so easy for people to shit on him. And you people shit on him for two reasons. One is, well, I'll forget the reasons, I'll give the explanation. The reason is just simply like, you know, it's fun to hate on somebody, you know, that you don't know, that like, why? And he's full, he's like, oh, they, they got too big-headed and then they could, they crash. People like that. But I think the criticism is what the criticism is. WeWork failed. Well, WeWork didn't really fail, it just didn't achieve the like You know, what's WeWork worth today? WeWork is still like, you know, uh, like $5 or $6 billion company, more valuable than, than anything that we've ever built, you know. So it's like, uh, yeah, WeWork is valued at $3.96 billion right now, publicly traded. Um, you know, so it's not like the— it's not like WeWork actually failed. It's just, you know, he raised too much money, too high valuation, didn't live up to that, uh, that dream at that, that promise. And a bunch of people got burned if you bought the stock or you joined the company at that really high price, yeah, you're underwater for that. So that's the first criticism. The second is he lied, cheated, steal, you know, he licensed the— he was like paying himself out of the company for the trademark of WE. He like, you know, did stupid things like, you know, this like summer camp where everybody got drunk and whatever. Those things to me are somewhere between a little whack, a little messed up to Actually, like, understandable and more common than you think when it comes to these, like, hypergrowth companies.
I don't think he's a liar. I think he's crazy.
Really hard-charging, kind of ego-driven people. But there's crazy good, there's crazy bad. Is he crazy good or crazy bad?
What do you think? Mostly good, but it could be, in some cases it was bad. But I think that when I, at least when I read about him, and I don't know the guy, I've hung out with, um, Miguel, the co-founder, and my, my read on these guys is, I don't think you're lying. I just think that you got some things wrong. And I think that you're just like, incredibly enthusiastic. And I don't know, like, is it when you paint the picture of the future and you end up being way wrong, you're, you're not a liar, you're just wrong. You know, you're optimistic, but you still called it wrong, but you're not a liar. Or at least you don't, you're not a liar if you believe that it's going to be true.
Right, right. Delusional or irrational is very different than like lying or fraud. And I think there's a line. Who knows if he crossed it? I don't know all the details. I'm not involved in all that, but from, from the outside, it looks to me like he was one of these guys who is a huge dreamer, irrational self-confidence, so unbelievable self-confidence that they are going to pull it off, that they're going to pull off this crazy, crazy dream. I do think they get, you know, high on their own supply where they start to think that, like, you know, the stuff that got them to the, to the point where, you know, you're on the COVID of Time magazine and everybody's throwing money at you to fund you, then all of a sudden you think, you know, I can't be touched. And I've seen this play out many, many times. I've gotten burned on some of these. So I've, you know, like I, you know, I invested in Terra, which was like, you know, the Luna-like crypto coin, right? And the founder of that was the same way. This guy Do Kwon, super smart, charismatic, unbelievable confidence that his thing was going to work. And some, some people all along the way were saying he's crazy. And then slowly but surely, a bunch of smart people gave him money, you know, because it was like, this guy's crazy, but he's kind of pulling it off. And Maybe he is just crazy enough to pull it off. And we have many examples in history of people who are crazy enough to pull it off. Let's see if this happens. And, and then over time, his ego ballooned and it ballooned and it ballooned. And he kept basically taking larger risks and tempting people to, to, you know, sort of call him on his bluff. And then, and then somebody did. And the market, like a series of events happened and it crashed and all went to zero and everybody looks dumb. And, you know, I lost $1 million of like, you know, what I had in worth of Luna. In like 2 days because I believed that this guy was going to be one of the crazy ones to pull it off. I didn't think he was not crazy. I thought he was crazy and like might be the good crazy and was worth the bet. And so on other times I've bailed because I thought, you know what, I'm not falling for this sort of the hero entrepreneur, the charisma, the visionary entrepreneur thing. I owned Tesla stock when it was really, really low. I remember, I remember at the time Tesla was valued at maybe like $2 billion and $2, $3 billion, something like that. And I remember investing in it. My dad was like, Tesla, they don't make any money. And I was like, yeah, but I think that like, you know, here's my reason why I think they're going to be big, ABC. And then I said, he's like, yeah, but like, you know, it's already valued at $3 billion. I was like, well, you know, at the time I think GM was like $25 billion or something like that. Um, one of the big companies.
Yeah, I mean, it hit a trillion. So like, you know, I would have rode $2 billion to a trillion. I can't do that.
So basically, that's like—
this was my— it was the first stock that I bought. I think I put in like $25K or something crazy like that.
But $25K would have been numbers, right?
Yeah, at one point they calculated it was a $5 million I, I would have had $5 million. I— what I did was I turned the $25K into like $125K, and I sold because I started to get suspicious that like, damn, this guy really overpromises. Like, and he had— he does overpromise. He overpromises on like when something will be built, how good it'll be. Like, he's pretty much wrong on the timing always. Like, he's, he's been saying that the Cybertruck is coming out. He's been saying that the, uh, you know, the Model 3 would be more affordable than it is. He'll say that Autopilot, like he's been charging people for Autopilot, like the self-driving full— you, you buy FSD, full self-driving, and it's like not full self-driving and you've been paying thousands of dollars for like multiple years now. And he always says it's right around the corner, right? So like this guy does have this. I remember when I was reading the, the, the Twitter stuff about like people who were basically saying this guy's a fraud, Tesla's a scam. Um, it was very, very convincing. There was a lot of convincing evidence. I remember like They went through 20 CFOs, 20 CFOs in like a 4-year timespan. And like the new CFO was like some guy who's never been a CFO before. And like somebody really smart once told me like, just follow the CFOs. The CFOs know what's going on with the company. They know the company health better than anybody. And like that made a lot of sense to me. I actually still believe that principle.
It just turned out to be wrong. Yeah, but it— no, no, it was right, which is that it was on the brink of collapse. Consistently, and he kept pushing.
He threaded the needle.
He pulled it off.
Yeah, he pulled it off. He threaded the needle. He pulled it off. And there's still a bunch— a mountain of evidence as to like that it was very close to failing, that he basically overpromised— slash, that overpromised would be the generous term, you know, sort of lied, manipulated, you know, to keep the stock up, to prevent it from getting like, you know, basically crashing and going out of business. There's a bunch of evidence that, that supports that. But the bottom line is he pulled it off and I was, you know, $5 million wrong for selling early. And, um, and so I've been on both sides of this and I, I think where I netted out is some people literally are just con artists and they are literally just going to scam you and their charisma will, um, will manipulate you and dupe you into, into believing on in them. But there, the, some of the best entrepreneurs do have the same, have such a similar profile where they're, irrational, delusional, willing to run into a fire pit and they're like, there's no way you'll make it out. And then 9 out of 10 don't, but the 1 out of 10 who do change the game. And so I've just sort of landed on, you know what, I'm going to lean towards optimistic on this because even though I would be right if I was pessimistic about it 9 times out of 10, I'd miss the, I'd have a false negative on the one that actually works out. And that one will A, pay for all the losers in investing terms. And B, like, you know, it's just more fun to sort of like follow these entrepreneurs and, and understand what they're doing, you know, and what, why they believe they can do this and, uh, be more, more optimistic than a hater towards them.
That's kind of where I landed with this. That's a good one. All right. Let me tell you, I'm gonna, I wanna end with two things. One is the lamest thing I've seen on the internet in the past few weeks. And number 2 is a company that is making way more money than I thought, and I'm absolutely going to clone it eventually. I'm going to start with the second one. The, uh, go to— perfect. Yeah. Go to bitpipe.com. So B-I-T-P-I-P-E.com. Tell me what you see.
Okay. Oh my God. All right. I see a Craigslist looking website. It says Bitpipe is the enterprise IT professional's guide To IT resources, browse this free online library with the latest technical white papers, webcasts, product information. All right, I don't know what this is, but basically looks like a set of blogs, maybe, uh, content about—
click one of them, click one of them, click content management.
Okay, I'm done.
Then click view now.
Okay, it looks like it's a set of reports.
So click view now. So I did it for you and it says now this is an article from Computer Weekly. It was released on August 22, uh, August 2022. And it's called, uh, uh, like, it's so technical. I don't even know what it actually is. What are the— what's the one that you're looking at?
I'm looking at Eurotunnel's digital journey for realities of post-COVID travel. And it tells me I could download this ezine. Ezine. The hell is that?
All right. And I'm gonna— let me tell you an even worse one. This one's called How to Choose an HR Software System.
Is that like what people call a magazine on the internet? A ezine? Yeah.
Is that what it's called? It's, it's old. So this one's, there's one called How to Choose. Listen to this one. It's called How to Choose an HR Software System. An HR system is one of the most important purchases an organization makes. Nowadays, the stakes couldn't be higher. And download this key, this guy, this e-guide, and learn all the key steps in setting up an effective buying process and how to identify HR, HR software features. Then it says, give us your corporate email address, your first name, last name, company name, job title, seniority, job function, number of employees, industry, address, country, state, zip, phone, and just click download now and we'll send it to you. All right. So this website, it's owned by a company that owns like 20 or 30 of these websites. And it only has about 3,000 customers, but it makes around $400 to $500 million a year in revenue. And the way it works— No.
Yes. Sam, no, no, no. I refuse to accept this reality. No, no way. Cut this out. I don't like this. I don't like this.
It's public. It's a publicly traded company. It's a publicly traded company. With a market cap of about $2.5 or $3 billion. So it's owned by a company called—
this exact thing, BitPipe, makes that much or the whole company makes that much?
The, the whole company, which is roughly like 10 or 20 of websites like this.
What's the company called?
TechTarget. So every company on this BitPipe website, you see how it says this is from ComputerWeekly.com or this article is from networking Uh, it's like FlowRoute, SocialNetworking.com. This was from, um, like this other website that talks about Global Knowledge, which is your guide on information systems. So they own like 10 or 20 publications that talk all about like buying software for huge companies, and they get very few people coming to these websites a month, very few, but because the article is called how to buy an HR system for 1,000+ employees, there's around 2,500 companies in America that will pay them money to, uh, do a couple things. The first thing is they want to contact the people. The lady who is giving in our— her email and information on an article on how to pick an HR system is a lady who maybe 30 different HR customers will say, hey, I'll give you $500 if you can give me that lady's information so I can call her. The second thing that they do is they, they'll track that lady, that lady Linda, she's gonna go to computerweekly.com and look at an HR software thing. Then she's gonna go to information system and look at a cloud, uh, software thing. And then, uh, what TechTarget is gonna do is they're gonna go to their clients and be like, hey, hey, motherfuckers, you there? I got a lady who's about to buy this thing, that thing, and that thing. You wanna talk to her? You wanna holler? And that's what they do. And that's how they make their money. And they make hundreds of millions of dollars a year. That's all they do. They go, hey, this motherfucker's about to buy some cloud software. They own a website actually called What Is, and it's just like people Googling like, like that. But that'd be their phrase, like, hey, what it is, bro? Yeah, yeah, I got this chief information officer at Gartner. Yeah, yeah, they want to score, bro.
Yeah, she's texting me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You up. This is insane. Sorry, so, but why do people— why is that person who's the head of HR, why are they landing at this website that looks like it's from like 1979? Why are they— this looks like, you know, back when the internet was called the intranet and it was like 6 computers. This looks like an intranet website. It's not even an internet site. And because what the fuck are they gonna Google versus just Googling?
Because dude, if you Google like What is a good software? If I'm, if I'm, you know, like, so if I'm the chief information officer of a 10,000 or 5,000 person company, I'm going to get my information from a few different ways. I'm going to watch loads of very specific webinars that are on like a trade show, a trade magazine. I'm going to read trade magazine and buy trade magazine. I'm going to learn about them because they're hosting like a 100-person trade show that all talks about like how to pick an HR software in Vegas. And it's really just a really fun way for me to go and watch the Chippendales, like, get— do their thing. But then I'm gonna go to, like, a vendor that day and, like, we're, you know, we're gonna hang out and do some blow. But then that— so they're gonna go to that website and learn all about it because that's how they know them. And then occasionally that company's gonna do a webinar. In order to access the webinar, you're— I'm gonna give them a bunch of information and they're gonna sell that information to the 8 companies that could possibly service me. And that's how the tech target makes money.. And so this lady, Linda, she's gonna go to all these websites and meet all these people because it's a small, it's a small, small industry. There's like maybe tens or at most hundreds of thousands of people who would do this. And this is what I've been thinking about, this B2B media world. It is awful. Say it with me. It is awful. It is a horrible, horrible industry. It is awful. Yes. With a, with a barrier or a, uh, uh, uh, the ba— the, it's such a low benchline or ben— uh, uh, threshold of what's good and what's not good. The content is horrible and people love it. And these businesses work.
Why aren't we starting a company that just beats these guys? Why aren't we starting the most boring B2B media company, but we put our spin on it just like Mugshot did to mugshots. We are going to do to the B2B media industry.
Why aren't we doing this? That's what we're going to call it. The B2B bitches. Hey, where are the B2B bitches? What's up? Yeah. It's gonna be like a, like a radio show where it's gonna be like, hey, it's the B2B Bitches. Today we're gonna talk about information systems.
You know, like, yeah, exactly. We're gonna have a podcast that's a radio station. Actually, we're just gonna have an AM radio station and we're gonna have a, uh, you know, we're gonna give pagers to every CIO in America and there's gonna be like little sound clips.
It's gonna be like, B2B bitches in the morning. Yeah, this is gonna work.
Yeah. You know, my favorite thing, by the way, those radio stations that do the cheaters segment, you see this, they like basically call. It's like, hey, will you call my boyfriend and just see if he would cheat on me? And like, they just like call the boyfriend and then she's on the other line and they basically trick him into being like, yeah, all right, I'll meet you at Home Depot. What time? And then they're like, Actually, Rebecca's on the other line and Rebecca's like, you son of a bitch. That's what we're gonna do. We're gonna get one vendor, your existing HR solution on the line, and then we're gonna call being like, hey, are you interested in a new HR solution? And when they say yes, we're gonna be like, oh, we got Workday on the line. Workday, what's up? He's gonna cheat on you.
He's gonna churn.
And it's called Churn Busters and we just catch him in the act.
No one has ever laughed at this. Style of content except until— or up until right now. We're the first people to ever make tech targets a fun topic. Yeah, but dude, this is interesting, right? This business model is crazy fascinating to me. They make money through webinars, they make money through like these e-papers, or they fucking call them a zine. I mean, that's just like who's working here. Um, so my next business— I already have started a company, it's like this community thing— I'm gonna add this, this style of company, I'm gonna add it to, uh, This is gonna be in our portfolio of products. Now let me show you the last thing, dude. Last week I said, can I just say before you do that?
Can I just, before you do that, this is, this is yet again a number 7. We got a number 7, a Sam Parr special. This is a Sam Parr special. It's like no one's even heard of this website. Somehow it does hundreds of millions of years a year. It does. It looks like it's from 1982 and like, You know, how do you even know these? I don't know. But this is a Sam's Bar special. This is why I like to talk to you, because you bring these things. Nobody, nobody I know in my entire life— I could, I could hit up every single person. I'd say, hey, you ever heard of BitPipe? I will get the answer no across the board. You're the only person that I know that knows about this stuff.
Well, look up TechTarget market cap. What is it? Is it like 2 point— it's like multibillion. It's like one of these companies that's just like in plain sight, but no one pays attention to.
Yeah.
Um, so it's there.
Uh, let's see the current price. So it's trading at $72 a share with a market cap of $2.1 billion.
And like, what was its peak? Its peak was probably 5 or 6 or 7. I mean, it's not like a little thing.
Uh, yeah, double. Yeah, basically double where it's at now.
All right, last thing, the lamest thing that I saw last week. So this guy posted on LinkedIn a picture of him crying. And it— he's— the post starts off, this will be the most vulnerable thing I'll ever share. I've gone back and forth whether to post this or not, but we just had to lay off a few of our employees. And he talks about how it's his fault and how he made all these decisions. And I'm gonna have to file this under things that I'm gonna take to the fucking grave. I cannot believe this post. I cannot believe this post. What happened to like a man being stoic and just like, you know, like just taking this, just take these feelings and just push them down, you know what I mean? Just accept it and push them down.
Hey, it's crazy. Hey, on that shelf that just has daddy issues, make room. Yeah, we got something new I need to put on the shelf. I'm very deep down in my gut.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want that problem to walk over, be like, Excuse me, you mind if I scooch in right here? That's what needs to happen with this. I cannot believe this person shared this. Is that ridiculous?
I mean, I don't even understand it, by the way. Uh, he goes, he goes, uh, I've seen a lot of, uh, I've seen a lot of layoffs over the last few weeks on LinkedIn. Most of these are due to the economy or whatever other reason. Ours, my fault. I made a decision in February that I stuck with for too long. Now I know my team will say we made this decision together. By the way, they won't. They'll say, you made this decision. They're not going to be like, we all made this mistake, boss. Um, yeah. So then he basically writes this long thing and he writes it like in the marketer style where it's every other line, like single line, enter, one line, enter. And then he posts this picture of himself looking into the camera crying. And this has, um, I think it has 50,000 likes and 10,000 comments, but most of the comments are just shitting on him, which is hilarious.
Oh, sorry, you said what? It has 50,000—
has 50,000 likes, 10,000 comments, and most of them are just making fun of this guy. So as, as is deserved, to be honest. Like, you know, at My First Million, we don't condone bullying, but we definitely don't condone absolutely faking the funk like this guy's doing. The, the top comment that I liked was some guy was like, hang on, did you turn your ring light on before you took this selfie? Because I can kind of see the reflection It looks like you turned a ring light on to take this selfie of you crying to post on LinkedIn. And that's like— that just calls it out so perfectly, the inauthenticity of the fake authenticity that this guy tried to portray.
I condone some type of bullying. I condone bullying this guy because if the bullies had they done their job, nerds like this wouldn't be going around existing. This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. I saw this and I was like, bullies, you failed us. How on earth did this guy get away with this?
You need, like, you know, in every ecosystem, it's like, yeah, well, these, uh, the plankton have to be there because they're absorbing this. And like, you know, these parasites actually, you need them because of this. That's why we need bullies. Otherwise, shit like this is going to run rampant if there's no bullying.
Yes. This guy, someone need— he needed a big brother. He needed a big sister, someone to be like, Look, this isn't how you act. This is not, this isn't the right way to behave when something like this happens. You dork. I cannot believe this post.
We're pro-bully here at the My First Million podcast.
Dude, there's just going to be a generation missing cool kids because of this. Um, no, I saw this post, man, and I thought this was great.
This is the definition of small boy stuff. Like when we say no small boys, this is what we're talking about.
Yeah, this is, this is, this is small boy stuff. This is, this is as small boy as it gets. I saw this and I was just like, oh man, I've seen, I've seen a bunch of these. Like, like Henry Ward from Carta wrote this letter of saying how he screwed up. And I was like, all right, that's cool, whatever. This is the worst example I've ever seen of this. I think that— what do you think's going to happen to this guy's career? Like, if you're a customer of his, I'd be like, oh, we like Your code must suck. Like, you know, like if you're, if your product is even 50% as weak as you, it's not going to work. Do you know what I mean? You know what I mean?
Dude, some of these comments are hilarious. They're like, um, Brandon, Braden, I understand these things happen, happens for a reason. Focus on the positive. Let it go. Rest easy, my sweet child. Rest easy. It starts off with a serious comment. It's like, sleep sweetly, my sweet child.
Is that a mannerism?
This is actually the best content ever on LinkedIn. This is the best content on LinkedIn. Like the comments, the combination of the post and the comments. All of a sudden LinkedIn was the most entertaining, uh, you know, like social media of the day from the, from this one post.
Dude, I was gagging reading it, man. It was— this was crazy. I felt embarrassed for— I just felt so embarrassed for him. You know how like we talk about cringe stuff? I legitimately cringed. I remember my face being like, ooh, like I just had that. My face was changing shapes reading this.
Yeah. Like I have this tooth that's like a little sensitive and it just started like ringing when I was like, ah. Uh, like I ate too cold of ice cream. Like, that's how it felt when I read this. It's just like this uncomfortable, this uncomfortable feeling that I just needed to pass. Uh, all right. So that's the episode. Uh, go tell your friends, tell your mom. Uh, you know, go add us on LinkedIn, go do what you gotta do. This is my first million.