The Startup Sins Of Uber, Why Scaling Is Overrated, and More
and what he was doing was every day he would wake up at like whatever, 5 or 6 in the morning and he would go to Phil's Coffee and he would sit down on his laptop. He first, he'd tweet out that he was at Phil's every single day and then he would start just literally emailing and tweeting at people that they should be posting their product on Product Hunt or, hey, I posted it for you, would love to hear your comment. Or, hey, I noticed this product that's a lot like yours. I wonder if, you know, or like that's in your industry, you should check this out. And all he was doing was like manually being the human notification system for Product Hunt. He was the human invite system, the notification system, the retention system. He was all of it.
I have a feeling you're coming with fire or something. You seem fiery today.
I got some good stuff. Uh, also I just watched, do you ever watch Barstool's interviews with people?
Do you watch? Are you talking about the Caleb Presley one?
I watched it today, dude.
His name's Caleb.
Yeah, it's like this like chubby guy named Glenny Balls who's sitting in the background, and then it's Caleb who's like a bro, but he's kind of— he's actually really funny. He's hilarious. He's quite smart, and he interviews these people. He asks the best questions. He's so good. Have you seen the past ones?
I've seen a few of them. This one is the first one I've watched like the whole thing, and, uh, God, he's good, man. He— that is amazing. So I watched that and sometimes that's all it takes. You just see someone being great at their thing and you're like, I'm going to be great today. That's it. I'm going to be great today. I saw great. Now I need— now I need to be great.
He makes me self-conscious. Caleb Presley is, is, is very, very good at these funny, awesome interviews. He's great on the spot. He's very good.
Yeah, he delivers. Um, all right, so let's do— can I tell you something? This is kind of amazing. All right, this is going to be a little hard to share on here. But I put this into the doc so you can click the links. Uh, Ben, if you can, let's screen share some of this stuff that's going to, I'm going to tell you, this is, I saw this ad on Instagram and this is the most amazing marketing funnel I've ever seen, maybe ever, but definitely for a musician. So check this out. Stop scrolling. You have 24 hours.
We're Kerala Lanka, an independent hip hop group. Last year we had the honor of being placed on Brockhampton's official community playlist. And we were also shouted out by Kenny Kira Lanka, go off.
I bet you can do it.
This year we're trying to grow our fan base. So for the first 15 people who DM us on Instagram in the next 24 hours, we're going to send you a special gift. Swipe up to DM us now.
So the beginning of the audio didn't play there, but he goes, do you recognize these people? And it's like Biggie, Pac, whoever, like just like a bunch of famous rappers. It goes, stop scrolling. And then he basically does this little thing. So I was like, so, so, uh, Ben Levy, Ben sent this to me.. And I was like, what is this amazingness? Let me, I, I must swipe up. I must know what this free gift is. So I do it. What does that lead you to? It opens up Facebook Messenger with a direct message already ready for their, like, for the, to their team. And it just says, send it, it automatically sends them a message from you saying, send me the free gift. Okay. So that happens. And then they, they respond, yo, what's good? Immediately. Right? So you're like, okay. I don't know what's happening here, but I'm intrigued. The next thing that happens, I have screenshots of this stuff, um, uh, below your, below some of your research. So they go, yo, Sean, what's good? So they use my name in the, in the thing. They pull it from Facebook Messenger and then it says, give us a little bit. We'll get back to you ASAP with your gift and some more details. Thanks for your patience. Okay, cool. One day later, I get a message. It's an audio note from the guys who are the, the, the, the rap group. And it's basically like introducing themselves. And, and again, this is kind of mass produced, but it works. They go, yo, Sean. And then it's the audio, which is like, yo, here's our story. We're these guys, blah, blah, blah. Here's what we're doing. And then they said, um, you know, for your gift, we wrote you your own custom song. We personalized the lyrics just for you. And, um, and so, you know, let me know what you think. It links to us. It links to their SoundCloud and it says Sean King of the First Million. That's the name of the song.
So then Uh, yeah, the homie Sean, he run it up, ain't no underhand.
Got his dogs with him. Yeah, that's the gang.
Hope you understand. I saw the homie on Twitter. Now he done messaged us. Invest your funds with a fiat.
Get it done. But I can't afford it to keep it real. So they send the song and I'm like, okay, well, I don't know what's happening right now, but like, this has never happened before where you go from— there's an Instagram ad about a band that you never heard of, then you swipe up, then they send you an audio note and a personal message, then they send you a song the following day that's like got your name in it. And then they followed up again and they're like, yo, um, I don't know if you're in New York. I'm gonna pretend you are. We're doing a show. Here's the, here's the link to a show. Here's the tickets. And then they send like this automated graphic using Canva of, you could see it there. It's like me crowd surfing.
Uh, it's like, scroll down.
I don't know what is going on, but this band is kind of genius in the way that they're promoting themselves. And they're still small. They're called Kerala Lanka. They're still small. But when I saw this, I was like, I don't know, they may not— they may or may not be the best musician, but they probably have the highest overlap of market— like, kind of marketing genius for a young band, and they play music, right? It's like, there's a lot of marketing geniuses out there, but they don't make music. There's a lot of musicians, but they don't know anything about marketing. These guys know enough about both to be very dangerous. I just thought this was amazing.
Is this, uh, effective, you think? I don't understand. So they're basically doing all this to get you to buy tickets to their New York show, is that right?
Well, it's not just that, like, it's not just to buy tickets to the specific show. It's basically the, the way I think about it is every business, you gotta find a way to get like your first 100 or first 1,000 customers who love you. And that's like a really specific thing. It's like, I just need 1,000 customers who love us, whether it was for this podcast, like we needed 1,000 people to listen who actually really love the show. And, um, and every business has this. And so the question is like, how do you actually do that? And, uh, At YC, they have this thing that they say, do things that don't scale. They talked about the early Airbnb guys, how they used to go and they, they themselves would go and call all the hosts of their New York Airbnbs. They would go to their houses, they would take professional looking photos so that the listings look better. And people were always laughing like, you know, that's not gonna scale. And they're like, well, first of all, it doesn't even matter if it scales because right now I don't need scale. I don't have scale. I just need something that's gonna get 1,000 people to really love us.. And, um, that's what these guys are doing. I thought this was just an amazing example of like actually betting on that strategy, which is that you need a small group of people to really love you and go to bat for you. Not a bunch of people who just kind of sort of like you or, oh yeah, I got, you know, we got 10,000 views on this thing. It's like, okay, but those, those views, do they matter? What are those views worth versus somebody who's got a story to tell like I'm doing right now, or somebody who's really impressed by you or feels interested in you or is invested in your story actually goes and clicks and learns more about you and, you know, goes deeper down your funnel. So I think that this is amazing because they're showing— they're brute forcing that thousand, thousand fans who, who really care about them.
Dude, I always hated this thing of, well, it doesn't scale, or you got to build the scale. I've always hated that conversation for a few reasons. Number one, most people aren't going to make it to the point where they ever have to worry about that. Number two, you can brute force it and just manually and by hand do things to a pretty large number. I think the largest number that I've seen— let's see, but I think MrBeast, uh, is, is his whole operation is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That's a pretty brute force. Not— I, I don't know what it looks like, but just talking to him, fairly unsophisticated operation. I think when I talked to NerdWallet, you know, NerdWallet, it's a— it was a blog that was at the time making like $30 million in revenue, and I, I think like $15 million in profit. Incredibly— I like saw a little bit behind the scenes, super unsophisticated. What are some other things? And it was basically just them just blogging. What are some other examples of things that you've seen that look like a tech or internet-based company on the outside, but behind the scenes are like pretty rudimentary and not even like— they've not even thought like, oh, we need to automate or scale or whatever.
So our buddy Ryan Hoover built Product Hunt and, um, he listens to the pod, so he came on the pod as well and told the story, but I was there kind of like front row when he was building that thing. Meaning like, I think I'm user number 17 in Product Hunt's history or something like that. Like very, very early, first dozen people or so that were on the platform. And so, and for some of us he was sending like updates on like literally what he was doing to build it. And what he was doing was every day he would wake up at like whatever, 5 or 6 in the morning and he would go to Phil's Coffee and he would sit down on his laptop. But first he'd tweet out that he was at Phil's every single day. And then he would start just literally emailing and tweeting at people that they should be posting their product on Product Hunt, or, hey, I posted it for you, would love to hear your comment. Or, hey, I noticed this product that's a lot like yours. I wonder if, you know, or like that's in your industry, you should check this out. And all he was doing was like manually being the human notification system for Product Hunt. He was the, he was the human invite system, the notification system, the retention system. He was all of it. And And at the time I was like, this guy's literally sending out hundreds of personal welcome emails a day, maybe 100 personalized tweets per day. And then he would like, sure enough, by 6 or 7 PM he'd close up his laptop, he'd go to the gym. He's a very structured guy. And then he would go home, he hits the bed early. He's not going out and socializing or doing anything like that. He'd wake up again the next day and he would do the same thing.. And sure enough, that community that we were part of, I think that first group he sent it to was like maybe 25 people and it didn't even have his own website. He was using this thing called LinkyDink at the time. It was like some third-party tool to go use. And every day he would send out the email, more email digest in the morning of the cool stuff people posted. And then he would tag each person with an individualized thing. Oh, Sean, I know you guys had once looked at building a product like this. What do you think about this? And he'd get you to share your thoughts cuz he was asking in such a nice, personalized way that, okay, I'll go ahead and reply. But that generated all of the activity for that early community. And why did Product Hunt work? Why did it sell for $20 million? Well, because at the beginning he got the right people from Silicon Valley to actually participate in the thing. And the way he did that was like, it's like when you watch somebody build a fire, it's like first they're just like, you know, they're just hitting the, the, the flint or they're rubbing the two sticks together just to get the spark. And then when it's there, they're sort of covering it and they're just blowing on it gently. And then they're adding just the next little few pieces of sticks and they know it could go out at any moment. And that's how it feels to build a community. I saw you do the same thing with Trends basically, right? Like for Trends, when you wanted to launch that, it was by no means going to be a slam dunk. And I think most of us who are in Trends would say the research reports you guys sent out, which was the product, they were cool. But the real reason anybody liked Trends, I think, was the Facebook group. And all it was was a Facebook group. It was nothing, you know, you didn't build that. You just literally went on there and typed a, typed a, you know, a title in and hit enter. And then, but what made the Facebook group good was you picked, you handpicked who could get in. And then every day I felt like you were sharing like some super high quality stuff to get a conversation started in the group chat. Was that intentional when you do that?
100%. That was intentional. And so what I, I, I did 2 or 3 interesting things. So this, yeah, so Trends right now is making many, many millions of dollars in subscription revenue. And it's pretty simple. And there's like, I think there's only 5 people who work on it. So it's like a pretty profitable thing. And we added these people to this Facebook group and I would do a few things. The first thing I would do is even people who didn't pay, who I thought were impressive, like you or some of our other friends, I'd be like, hey, I'm adding you to this group. And I would just tell them and I would manually add them. And I'd be like, oh, look who just joined. You know, it's Sean. Sean has done all these impressive things. Funny seeing you here. How cool. If you have any questions for Sean, just like ask him right here in the comments. And I would do that all the time.
So I would add these people who didn't actually work, by the way, because I was like, oh shit, this group has cool people. And it's in reality that you added 300 paid members that I've never heard of. And then you added one interesting person, but you made that intro post baller. You're like, you ever seen a plane fly? Yeah, that's because of this guy. You know, it's like it was always the most like baller intro. You're like, Um, you know, did you know they didn't have $100 bills till this guy came around? It's like, wow.
I did that all the time. And the other thing I would do is I would just write out all these long posts of like interesting things that I was thinking about. And then I would tag certain people who A, either accomplished something like that and would, and would talk about it, or B, I would write comments for smart people and message them and say, hey, can you do me a favor? Post this on there. Or I would write posts for other people and make them comment. One time, uh, when HubSpot was looking to buy us, I saw that Brian Halligan, the then— he's the founder and then CEO of the company— he joined. And I messaged like 80 people and I said, hey, uh, reply to Brian. Here's the message to say to him. And so many people commented. And then he checked in like 8 hours later and he's like, oh my God, I've been overwhelmed with replies and notifications. I can't believe how thriving this community is. And I remember thinking like, got him, got him. And that's— but that like interaction is how you make all— like, that's the feeling you want all community members to feel. And we used to do that all the time. But yeah, Ryan Hoover is a good example of people who have grown without like really caring about scaling. We should have like a segment another time where we like actually think about like the most like thrown together duct tape shit that we've seen that has gotten quite large.
And I'm going to give you another angle towards this. So there's one which is the brute force, do things that don't scale, and they almost do them even longer than that. They do it even past the point where you shouldn't be able to keep this up. Like Airbnb still does that photographer thing, by the way. They turned that unscalable thing of them going to people's apartments, taking photos for them and saying, hey, we'll, we'll improve your listing for you. And now they just have a fleet of photographers around the country that'll just come do this for your listing. It's like, it's that they actually turned it into a scalable thing.
And that's another thing when people talk about, well, that's not scalable. It's like, Uh, yeah, it is. Like, they'll talk about like an ad agency and they're like, that's not scalable. It's like, what do you mean? Of course it's scalable. You just hire 5,000 employees. Like that, that's scalable. It may be, that's not what you want to do, but like, yeah, everything, virtually everything is scalable. Like you just have to add a ton of people.
Probably most things can scale past what most people think. Uh, like, you know, this also happens in engineering all the time. You work with engineers and they're like, well, We're gonna need to build it right before we launch, or we're gonna need to build it right because this won't work in production. And so this won't work when it scales. It's like, then you hear these stories. It's like, yeah, Facebook was written in PHP. Why? I don't know. That's just the language he knew at the time. And that's what he did. You know, it's like, and yeah, actually it still runs, you know, years later it was still running in that, like way past where it was supposed to.
Um, and like, dude, I, I've got friends that are early at Uber and friends that are still at Uber. And a lot of people don't know this, but I, they might consider him a founder, but the first or second employee was this Mexican guy. And, you know, he, like, I think he was, lived in America for a little while, but at the time he was living in Mexico. And so the early versions of Uber were written with a ton of Spanish in the code. And, and so my friends who were early there, they told me, yeah, like, I, I forget this guy's name. Do you know who I'm talking about?
I've, I, I remember reading about him, but I don't know his name top of my head.
Yeah, he was, he was Mexican. And so they, and he had, you know, his friends in Mexico were like, yeah, well, well, my, I know a good agency. We're gonna have 'em do it. And they said it was kind of thrown together and kind of janky. And I've got friends now that still work there and they say every once in a while we'll find Spanish in the early code base because that is, you know, what these guys are writing. And we'll find like Spanish notes and things like that. And that was the early version of Uber.
And think about how many rules of Uber got violated, of, uh, how many rules of startups that Uber violated. So for example, um, The Uber founders, Travis and Garrett, they didn't work on it full-time. Uber was not a project they were willing to do. They just literally tweeted out, hey, we need a general manager, and random guy named Ryan Graves was like, I'm a hustler, I'll do it. And they're like, all right, cool. It's like they literally like delegated the CEO job. Then did they have a super strong technical team, technical co-founder who could write the code and do this in-house?
Nope.
Use the third-party dev shop to build the, the first version of the app. They outsourced the coding. You know, most of the investors who invested in Uber would tell you, if you're a, a product guy and you go in and you say, yeah, I'm gonna just use an agency to write the code for the app, they'd be like, uh, yeah, this is not, yeah, no go. Okay, then what's the next thing? Then they literally broke actual laws. It was like running and they were, they got a cease and desist from San Francisco saying, hey, for every day you're operational, you owe us $5,000 per day. And they just kept going. Then the next, you know, they just violated rule. Another one at the time, I remember at the time when Uber first came out, Airbnb was, was popular at the time. And I talked to our investor. I was like, should we be doing a product like this? He's like, ah, no, bits, not atoms. That was like a common phrase in Silicon Valley, which is you want to do startups that are software-based, cuz they can, they're the ones that can scale and have profit margins. All these things with real-world cars and homes and t-shirts and stuff like that. Like that stuff, super hard to scale, ends up being super, super low margin. And okay, and some people say, oh, they're right, you know, Uber's not that profitable. But the reality is that the founders and investors in Uber did fantastically well scaling this thing up. And it was kind of a narrative violation. There was all these narrative violations, all these, these general rules that were broken that like today, if you said, yeah, I'm the, I'm the founder of this thing, no, I'm not working on it full time. I found a guy on Twitter to be the CEO and then we're using this agency in Mexico to build the app. Yeah, we're the next big thing. That doesn't fly. And guess what?
It worked, dude. We got to go on a quick story tangent. That's kind of what this whole first half is going to be, I guess. But there's this guy named Scott Belsky. I'm friends with them, or I used to be a little, uh, friends with them. I haven't talked to him in a while, but you do know Scott?
Yeah, I'm— I like him a lot. I like to think I'm friends with him. The reality is I've talked to him twice.
Yeah, friendly with him. He invested in my company, and I've hung out with him once or twice. He doesn't know this, but he's kind of like I'm his secret admirer. Like, he's like this, like, good-looking, handsome dude who dresses nice, nice, and seems like really wealthy and rich. And like, I like— and I see him, I'm like, dude, you are the best. And I've talked to him.
If you have $10 million and a jawline, guess who's all in? Sam is all in.
Yeah, yeah, definitely all in. So like, I love this guy and he's great. So basically, I got to tell you a quick Scott Belsky story. So right now he's like an executive at Adobe. But not just like an executive. I'm pretty sure he's like in line to be CEO. And a lot of people don't realize this. Adobe's one of like the 30th largest companies in the world. I think their market cap is like $300, $400 billion. And Scott Belsky is, he's pretty young. He's in his early 40s. And he, uh, I cold emailed him to invest in The Hustle and that's how I became friends with him. And I met with him one time and he goes, yeah, so like when I was 26 years old, I was starting my company called Behance. So Behance is basically It's Behance and Dribbble are like the two companies where you go online and designers can host their portfolio and kind of talk to one another. And he was like, I was just starting this company. And in my head I knew he worked at Goldman and I knew that he was from like a wealthy, like Jewish family. I think his father, his grandfather started like Kaplan, you know, Kaplan University. No way. Yeah. And so I was like stereotyping him as, oh, you guys, you had everything handed to you, to him. And like, he told me a few stories where I was like, oh, you actually like It's not exactly how it seems from the outside. And he said, I left Goldman and I was making 90 grand a year there. And when I left, I had like $50,000 or $60,000 saved. I started Behance. It didn't go very well and we bootstrapped it. And I noticed that with Behance, we were getting a lot of traffic from two different websites. The first was called StumbleUpon and people and designers would post cool designs and we would get traffic from StumbleUpon. And the second was a small company called Pinterest. And I emailed both these guys Uh, and this was, I forget what year, 2011, 2010. He goes, I've emailed these guys. I go, hey, you guys are sending us like hundreds of people a day, which for us at the time was a lot of people. What, what are these websites? And this guy Ben told me about this website called Pinterest. And then this guy named Garrett told me about StumbleUpon. And Ben was like, hey, I'm gonna raise a little bit of money. Do you want to invest? It's a $3 million valuation. And Scott was like, dude, I only have like 50 grand. And, but I don't wanna like look like a noob to this guy, whatever. I'll invest $15,000. And that's a big deal to me. And then Garrett was like, hey, um, my friend and I are starting this other thing. None of us are gonna work there because I'm too busy running SumoPwn, but it's basically like a car service. And, uh, Scott was like, I don't wanna invest in a limo company. Like, there's no way a limo company's gonna take off. Uh, but like, I don't wanna look like an idiot. This guy's been sending me some traffic and I, I kind of wanna like appear a little bit like a big shot. And so he gave him $15,000, I think at a $3.5 million valuation. And he did both of these in the span, I think of about 2 weeks. So he is like, I basically had like 50 or 60 grand in my checking account at the time. Time. My startup that I was bootstrapping was only doing okay. It wasn't making much profit, and I was doing consulting on the side to pay the bills. But I did— my wife was like angry at me, but I gave them each $15,000. Fast forward however many years, they both went public around the same-ish time. And I remember sending him something to his house, and he sent me his address. And I remember the address being this like really fancy townhome, and I— because I looked it up, and I was like doing the math, and I'm pretty sure each of these $15,000 checks turned into around $50 to $100 million each inside a span of like— you'll have to look up when they went public, but they almost went public right around the same time. And he gave them money each at the same time. And another thing a lot of people don't know is Behance, his company, sold, I think, for $175 million. And I think he owned— he told me around 70% of it. He owned the majority of it. And so this guy has just knocked it out the park over and over and over again. And a lot of it came because of Uber and Pinterest early on. And he was like, I don't think these are that good of ideas., but I just, I don't wanna look silly.
That's a, that's an amazing story. I love that story. It reminds me, I, uh, I just got a DM from this guy, by the way, this is nowhere near related. I am not trying to compare apples to apples here. It's very hard to have a story that compares to Uber and Pinterest. But, uh, there's a guy who, I don't know, maybe 6 months ago or 9 months ago, something like that. I was like getting kind of interested in the like AI stuff., about like, you know, this basically artificial intelligence that can create art and things like that. And I had said something offhand on the pod, so somebody reached out and they were like, hey, you know, heard you're interested in this. I'm trying to make apps that will do this. Uh, we just released our first one. You know, I wanna see what you think about it. And, uh, you know, we're raising a little bit of money. We'd love to see if you wanna, wanna invest. Um, never replied. I go, uh, I get another DM or no, I, uh, I see somebody mention this app and I go, I go click on the founder and I click the DM. I'm like, oh, this guy DM'd me a while back saying invest. I should, I should see how it's going. So I go, hey, how's the biz going? I'll share a screenshot of this. Hey, how's the biz going? And he goes, good man. Good. Yeah, that app, I really ended up releasing it. It's been downloaded 120 million times. Oh. And, um, and then I released another one and it's also been downloaded like 100 million times. And, um, Yeah, it's really, it's going really well, man. How are you? I was like, well, I'm currently walking off of a cliff because I never responded to that initial DM.
Everybody's like, well, I recently switched from Trader Joe's to Whole Foods. I've been tinkering with that.
I just did my 401k match. Fascinating.
You sure you're sure? Probably not much, you. Uh, that's crazy.
I, I wanna share one other story that's kind of related to the do things that don't scale. This is something I actually learned from those guys, Dylan and Henry. So I'm a big fan of this like idea that you have to find a way to learn from 3 groups of people, people that have done it before. So people who have done it a bunch of times. So that's, you know, people normally try to go learn from them, mentor type people. People that are in the game, their peers just alongside you. That's kind of how we got to know each other. We were in a peer group, a mastermind group, and no, we haven't made it, but like we're all trying to make it at the same time. And so we can learn a lot from each other. And then lastly is people who are just starting out in the game fresh. They don't know any better. And there is a certain tactic to like, A, spend time with each of those 3 groups, and then B, be humble enough and know how to ask the right question so that you know how to actually get advice from all 3 of those groups.? Cause if you ask the same question to all 3, you're not gonna get valid information. You're not gonna get the right answers from all 3, right? Like the question you would ask to somebody who's been through it before and the things you should talk to them about are different than the ones that you should talk to your, your buddy who's going through it right now. And the 19-year-old who just graduated from college, you can't ask the same question. So I'll tell you something that the, the sort of the 19, 21-year-old or whatever, I don't know how old they were at the time, maybe 21, 22, uh, Dylan and Henry, they were fans of the pod. Then they flew, they offered to come help us with our video setups at the time.
Well, and previously they were fans of the pod and they would chop up clips for us and share it on social media. And a lot of their videos were beautiful, awesome. And they just brute forced their way to having a relationship with us.
They exactly. And that became a full-on agency that does, you know, pretty well. They, they did it for us, then they did it for the All In podcast. They did it for a bunch of people. And so people kind of know them now. But at the time, nobody really knew who they were. They were just guys who just graduated from college. They had their own podcast, which was kind of like ours. But no, you can go look at the views. Nobody watches the thing. That's okay. Most podcasts nobody listens to, especially ones by guys who just graduated from college. But they flew out to our house there and they were installing the kind of studio setup in my garage at the time. And I went out there, I was like, you guys need some water? You guys all right? Have you guys eaten anything? I was kind of like parenting them. I was like, are you guys okay? What are you doing here? And so I went out there and I started shooting the shit with them. I was talking to them and I was like, so what's your guys'— I was like, give me advice. If I was your friend and I'm like, you guys got a podcast, that's pretty cool. Most people your age don't have a podcast. What's y'all's strategy? What are you trying to do? Why are you trying to do it? What are you trying to do? And I was like, explain it to me like I was your buddy. And they're like, well, Um, you know, we kind of, we like podcasting, it's fun. So that's why we do it. The second thing is, um, we just think that like making content, like we don't have money to go advertise. We don't have like, we don't have connections that we could just go knock on a door and get into some, get distribution somewhere. So like content is our only chance. So we just wanted to get good at content. The best way to get good is just to do it a bunch. I was like, all right, that's another smart thing. And I go, but nobody's watching your shit, right? So like, Is it even working? It's kind of like what you were saying about this band thing. Does this even work? This is cool. It's interesting, but is this valuable? Is this actually going to work? And he goes, oh, I'm just wait— he goes, nobody watches it today. He goes, but someday if we start to get people to watch, there is now a library. He goes, we call it our binge bank. It's a place where you can go and you could binge Dylan and Henry.. And I was like, what? And he's like, yeah, well basically we just wanna have a rabbit hole for you to go up, go down. Because if anybody ever gets interested, like today, nobody's interested, but if people ever get interested, I wanna have this bank of content that they can go binge. And sure enough, after like, you know, 45 minutes down this rabbit hole, you're gonna walk out being like, I think I love these guys. I feel like I know these guys and I wanna hang out or work with these guys. And I heard that and I was like, that's really fucking smart. I was like, that's the way to think about content. Especially because most content doesn't just like immediately hit and blow up, but you want to have this. And I thought about it because I was like, there are several people who I've gone down that rabbit hole with and I've come out with that same exact conclusion after a 45-minute dig. You do this all the time. Like you discover somebody, you go read everything there is about them. You go read their old blog, you watch their old talks, and you come out, you'd be like, this guy is awesome. This, this girl is amazing. And they had to create that like library of themselves, that personal library to go and let you binge. And I thought about it because, you know, the band, like the guy Macklemore, the, like the famous rapper guy, I remember maybe 10 years ago now, me and my buddy Trevor, we started like, we like found his, one of his songs and we were like, oh, this guy's cool. Who is this guy? And he had a binge bank. He had these vlogs he was doing on YouTube of him like trying to make it as a rapper. It'd be like, we're going to doing this show at this small college in Wichita. Oh, We like, we're wait every day right now. We're waking up at this time. We're trying to record in the studio cuz we suck at create the creative process. So we're just trying to train ourselves, right? They were just like, just kind of sharing along the way. Right. And we watched this stuff and we were like, I remember these videos had less than 1,000 views. There were like 700 views on YouTube at the time. Like I just went back and looked at it. Now those have each like millions or like close to a million views each on those videos at the time, less than 1,000. And we became super fans of this guy. Why? Because it's fun to be early. We liked what they were all about and we felt like the quality of content was like higher than the views. And so that made it for like an exciting— it's like we found a treasure, dude. People say that in our comments on YouTube, like, oh, I'm like, I'm, I'm surprised this isn't bigger. Or like, I'm happy to be here.
Yeah. They're like, they're like, I'm happy we're catching up. Yeah. And that, that definitely gives me encouragement. It makes me happy. But yeah, people say that in our— you little do they know that like our podcast has like 10 times more downloads. So they're like, oh, this little shitty podcast only has 10,000 videos on this thing. Or 10,000 views on this thing. And I'm like, yeah, we suck. Sure.
Uh, please share, please. Yeah. Um, but I'm a big fan of this Binge Bank concept. I've, I, once I thought, once I said that, that clicked with me. I started thinking about our stuff that way. And then also I started remembering, yeah, there's actually a bunch of people who I've gone down their rabbit hole and like, and actually there could be like a product that's like this. I know YouTube is kind of structured this way, but I kind of wish that You could just have a thing which is like your greatest hits. It's like, yo, if you, if you're kind of interested in me, this is the curated rabbit hole. So this is my tweet that went viral. This is this video. This was the first thing I ever made. This was, you know, this blog post I wrote back in the day. It's kind of stupid, but like, you know, it captured how I was thinking at the time.
I have two tools that I use regularly and I'm paying subscribers of the first. And do you read a lot of biographies?
No.
None. So I read a ton of biographies. Yeah, I read a ton of biographies. And so any biography that talks about a person who is a little bit pre-internet era, I'm a subscriber of newspapers.com, which has aggregated like every newspaper ever. So like, for example, I was reading a biography about Dan Gilbert or something about Dan Gilbert, the founder of Rocket Mortgage, I think it's called, and the guy who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, or I forget, he owns everything. Yep. And so like his company got— it was called Rock Financial originally. His company got popular in the '90s. And so I just Google Rock Financial, Dan Gilbert, set newspapers.com to 1985. So I knew that's when he started, to 1990, uh, and then went public in '92. So I was like, I'm going to find everything. I read all of these articles, uh, about him before he was like, you know, it was like really like he was in the making at that point. And so that's like my favorite tool is newspapers.com. The second one for anything that's internet related is Web Archive. So like whenever I talk to anyone who's like popular on the internet, I go and look back at right when they started. I like to look at their old websites and you could like see the trend and you could see the trajectory. And that starts— that teaches me a little bit about patterns and like, all right, it's okay. And it also makes me feel like, all right, it's okay to be shitty even at this size. It's okay to be only okay around this size. You know what I mean?
Totally, totally. Yeah. You go look at early startup landing pages. I have a blog post about this actually, like 10 throwback, uh, landing pages. And it's like, go look at the first version of Airbnb, of Uber, of Snapchat, of all these things. And then you'll be like, oh, why are we trying to perfect this before lunch? Like, if you could start there and end up where these guys did, like, I can start wherever the hell I am now and launch and then make it better over time.
Um, do you, uh, you want to go to a— can I— let me, let me bring up one. So yeah, this, this guy DM'd me and I found his YouTube video and it was really amazing. So basically in two— this has got me thinking on this whole topic, but in 2014, this guy graduated from Stanford and he got 5 job offers and he did this video that he goes, here's the offers that I got in 2014 and here's what happened. And here's like how like this story played out. So he, in the video, it's really great. So, uh, actually it looks like someone's highlighting the video. What's his name? His— how do people find this? His name's Rahul. So if you Google like Rahul, uh, tech—
Pandey.
Pandey.
P-A-N-D-E-Y.
Yeah. So Google that or just like Rahul and then like tech jobs and I bet you it will come up. So basically I'm going to summarize it, but here the video is great, but here's basically the offers that he got. So the offers that he got from Twitter with a combination of stock and salary was $190,000 with a combination of stock and cash. His Facebook offer was $200,000 a year. His Microsoft one was around also $200,000 a year. His Square one around $160,000 a year. And this is both a combination of stock equity and sign-up bonus. And his Google one was $250,000 a year. Now fast forward 8 years, what would that stock plus cash be worth? So basically the stock— the cash is mostly stagnant. I think he added like an 8% annual growth. The stock, he looks at what each, uh, what it grew since then. So his Twitter comp Fast forward, it would almost be the same because their stock hasn't grown. His Facebook stock, it actually would have gone a lot higher, but right now Facebook stock is down a ton. And so his Facebook, uh, first year comp went from $200,000 to $220,000. His Microsoft comp, it started at $200,000. If you fast forward today, it would be worth around $300,000 a year. Now here's where things get interesting. His Square stuff— and, and he was only 22 when he graduated or something like that, and he his first year salary and comp back then would be $160,000. Fast forward, the stock is now worth $580,000 and his Google stuff was worth $250,000 a year, now worth almost $700,000 a year. And keep in mind, so here's a few takeaways from this. The first takeaway, he said this funny thing in the video. He goes, Square offered me something, uh, that I didn't think was any good because the recruiter said, you know, if Square one day becomes a $7 billion company, The stock that we're offering you now, it's only worth $100,000 over 4 years. It could be worth $400,000. But he goes, I'm really doubtful that Square will ever be a $7 billion company. Now it's worth $50 billion and it's down right now. I think at its peak it was $70 billion. Uh, so the thing that is really hard to understand is that everything at the time, most things seem expensive. And the reason why things seem expensive is because exponential growth is incredibly challenging to understand. So if I tell you that something is gonna grow at 7% a year, every single year, that's actually kind of hard to understand. But that what that means is it's gonna double every 10 years. If it's gonna grow, if it's gonna grow at 30% a year, which a lot of these tech companies are, that means it's gonna double, I think every 2 or 3 years. And like exponential growth is really hard to understand. The, the, another thing that is really interesting is, uh, leveraging offers and negotiating is very possible even if you're a 22, 23, 24-year-old.. And so you always do better when you have another offer in hand and you play them, uh, off one another. And finally, the most important thing for people listening, employees at tech companies 100% can get meaningfully rich. And people don't talk about that enough because it's a fairly safe way. If you are good enough, it's a high bar. If you are good enough to get, but it's still like a million plus jobs if you add together FAANG. I, uh, or around there and they hire tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands a year. So it's not like that coveted, but if you can get a job at one of these tech companies, and I'm talking about a tech company that's growing quickly and has at least 1,000 employees, relatively safe. It is such a good way to build wealth in a low risk way. And the final most important thing on top of that is now's the time. So we're, you're talking about Square being worth like You know, it might be worth $7 billion. I, I have a very small lens here, but I see what the private company valuations are. They have reset and even better, the public companies have reset. So we have Square, Facebook, Twilio, maybe Robinhood. I think like a company like HubSpot or something like that, a Coinbase, all these valuations are pretty low if you ask me. And I think now's the time where you can get some of these offers where you're getting paid $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 a year in equity. And that could be worth potentially 8 figures in 10 years.
That's really interesting and a great ad for HubSpot. Very well done. Very native. I enjoyed that one. This data is wrong every freaking time.
Well, I can see the client's whole history— calls, support tickets, emails, and Here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed.
The, um, when we were selling Bebo, uh, we had a bunch of conversations and then, you know, you sort of compare offers. You're like, all right, we had, I think at the end we ended up with 3 offers. We had a Facebook offer, we had the Twitch offer, and we had a not papered, but like only because we turned it down early, but he was interested, the, the, a Discord offer. And, and I did an exercise recently where I looked back and I said, what was I thinking then? Cuz I wrote it all down and how did it actually play out? And I'll be damned if I wasn't wrong on every single thing I believed.
So yeah, let's talk through this. Yeah, let's go through each one.
So for example, we'll start with the one that's relevant to what you're talking about, which is the stock. Uh, so, so basically Discord was like, look, We like you guys, we think this is cool, but we— there's no way we would come up with cash like you're talking about. So it would need to be just a tiny bit of cash and then mostly stock. But like, we think our stock is great.
So what would, uh, let's say, let's say that you walked away with $1 million of Discord stock back then, and back then it wasn't that long ago. That was 4 years ago.
Yeah. Less than 4 years, 3 years ago, 3 or 4 years ago, something like that. So at that time I went and talked to one of Discord's investors and I was like, what do you think about this? And they were like, well, it's real simple. Like, Today, let's say Discord is valued just around 2, you know, $1.5, $2 billion. Um, so let's say $2 billion. Um, oh no, I think at the time Discord was valued at $1 billion and it was $1 billion then. And he goes, you're basically just betting that Discord can be worth $5 billion. If it was, if it, if it gets to $5 billion, then this is the best offer. And if it's not gonna get to $5 billion, then this is the worst offer. And so you just have to like, you know, make an educated decision about that.. And I was like, in my head I was like, well, I do, like, I was a big admirer of Discord. I was like, Discord is kind of amazing. Uh, the CEO at Discord, Jason, he's kind of amazing. He, of all the meetings that we took, I thought he was the, he was actually the most impressive in there. And he cut straight to the chase and was like, yep, I, I'll do this. No ca— uh, you know, the cash is gonna be small, maybe $1, $2, $3 million. Um, and then the rest will be stock. And so, you know, you guys have to— is that interesting to you? And at the time I was like, no, because that sounds really speculative and like illiquid and like I can't go buy anything cool and I can't like— the total number as valued today sounds way lower. Yeah. And in my head I was just like, I can't do this. Fast forward, Discord I think is worth about $15 billion now. So it would have been by far the best deal. So we had a million dollars deal.
If they gave you $1 million of stock private valuations, that would be worth $15 million now in 4 years, right? Correct.
And we were getting more than $1 million of stock if we had done that deal. Okay. So, uh, so it was, it was the worst deal. It would have turned out to be that. So now that there was one caveat, which is it was going to be vested. So, you know, I'd also have to spend, you know, 3 years earning that stock or 4 years earning that stock, which I didn't. Yeah.
You probably would have been fired way before that.
Yeah. So, so, you know, what are the odds I was going to capture all that? I don't know. But like it just shows, you know, uh, how our brain is not real. Like the idea of Discord becoming worth $15 billion was not really like, it didn't seem very likely, but in actuality the, the odds were probably in its favor, but it seemed like a very low probability thing. 'Cause it just sounded big. It sounded like a big jump. It's like, is it, am I betting that Discord's gonna become 15 times bigger than it is today? And actually, yeah, it did. Like the user base grew by 2 or 3x. The monetization grew, the, the overall market grew. There's like all these different ways that you just multiply these things together and you get— you arrive at this private market valuation now. And also whatever private markets have corrected, maybe it's not worth as much now, but like, you know, it's, it's hard to say. It's illiquid. Then the next one was the Facebook offer and it's like, all right, well, Facebook's offer is higher in cash, higher in stock. But we don't know about this. We don't know exactly which stock's going to perform better, Facebook or Amazon. They both seem like great stocks. Uh, and so then it came down to intangible factors and we ended up ruling out Facebook for some intangible factors, which were in retrospect, somewhat silly reasons to decide. Uh, the first was, uh, like Twitch was the leader in game streaming and Facebook was like, nobody watches game streaming on Facebook at the time. And I was like, oh man, this is just going to be like another startup. Like they are, they're at, they're called Facebook, but like in this niche they're at zero and they're hoping that we can help them win. And like, Oh man, and we're gonna be pushing a boulder up a hill. I was like, I just want to go join the Warriors and like go play on the winning team.
Yeah, exactly. And also like my mentor was like, that's such a stupid way to think about this. Like you're going to walk into Facebook and they're going to be like, um, cool, game streaming's over here. And you're like, actually, I'm going to wander around this area over here. I'm going to go play in virtual reality. I'm going to go to AI. I'm going to go to, you know, news. I'm going to get He's like, you can just walk into any other department you want and just go do that thing. He's like, they'll forget you even exist after they hire you. Like, you're worried about what your day-to-day life is going to be like there. And like, you have no idea what your daily life is going to be like there. And he was absolutely right.
By the way, have you ever been to the Facebook campus? Yeah, it's, it's basically like those, like a better college. The way that I describe it, it's like a mall where everything's free. So like they have like a food court. And they don't have just one pizza place. They've got many pizza places. And it's one— my wife worked there and I would go and I'm like, oh, this is the best thing ever. And they have restaurants, like a sushi restaurant. Everything's free. They've got an ice cream place. Everything's free. They've got a woodworking shop. Everything's free. A laundry place, a barber, a dentist, the barber.
That's what— that's the biggest one. I was like, food I expected. But when I just saw you could just walk over to this guy and get a haircut, I was like, damn, that was like, that was like a big draw for me. I was like, I could just, I don't have to go anywhere. It's just free. I just walk in and get a haircut. That's, Kind of amazing.
Yeah. They're like, it's free. All you have to give us is your life.
Deal.
Yes.
I mean, did you say there's two pizza shops on campus?
Uh, so how much would the Facebook— so a million in Facebook back, uh, 4 years ago would be worth what?
Um, a million in Facebook stock would've been, uh, it's, it's gone, I think up 30% since then. So it's like, you know, a million would've been 1.3. Right. So that's the, like where the stock landed at its peak. It was about double. So at its peak it would've been double, right? So, uh, and so in that one we made the mistake of basically, um, optimizing for really intangible things. One, one that seemed really tangible was like they weren't gonna take our whole team. And I was like, oh, I don't want to like toast at the celebration party of this acquisition and be like, but not you four. They didn't hire you guys. So like, uh, you know, it's been awesome. The rest of us, we're gonna go and you guys, 'You won't believe the recommendation letter I'm gonna write you,' right? Like, that would have been—
here's some cab money, thanks for last night.
Yeah, exactly. So that, that wasn't gonna feel good. Of course, as soon as we rejected them and they were like, 'Why?' And I was like, 'Well, the team thing.' They're like, 'Dude, we would have just hired them a few months later. We just didn't have the headcount yet.' Like, he's like, 'Ah.' He's like, 'That's why?' And I was like, 'Yeah.' And the commute was really far down there. He's like, Dude, we have an SF office. We could have got you in.
I was like, also the commute, they have a bus, like a bus that basically has like a restaurant, cafe, like toilet, internet, TV on the bus. It's not even a real commute anymore.
Yeah. People on the bus complained. They're like, oh my God, like the line for the pedicure on the bus was so long this morning. It's like, all right, you know, I don't know what you're complaining about anyway. So we made a decision. We made it. We made a really hard decision and whatever ended up fine. But I guess like my point is It's really hard to forecast and predict these things, and especially hard to forecast and predict what stock is gonna be worth down the road.
That's awesome.
Uh, all right. So, so, uh, I have another topic that I wanna go to.
All right.
Quick, I, two quick ideas. One is around what I just talked about, predictions. So, um, there's this company that, uh, Brandon sent me that's called Pressy Taste. I, I don't even know what this is. It's a horrible name. Prci Taste. If you go to prcitaste.com, and it's some kind of like, basically it's a prediction engine. I don't even honestly know exactly how this works, but basically what it's doing is it's using data like, um, cameras, um, like historical trends, whatever. And what it's trying to do is tell the person in the back like how many burgers to put on the stove, like how, how many, how many fries to take out of the freezer., because it's basically like, how can we help you predict demand? And so this idea aside, I actually think that there's like a lot of different ways where this is really valuable. So for example, we own an e-commerce store and we're always trying to predict like how much inventory should we order. We're ordering, you know, 6 to 9 months in advance sometimes. And it's so hard to forecast what's the world gonna be like 6 months from now. It's like, oh yeah, turns out there was a pandemic, a war, a war. Like, you know, stimmy checks that like caused everything to go up and then like everything to go down and then shipping broke and like, you know, it was impossible to predict. But every bit, like every better prediction saves us a lot of money. And so I actually think that there's like a whole bunch of business problems that entrepreneurs could go after that basically just help you predict how much demand there will be. There's a couple different ways you could go about this. So for example, for our e-com store, it'd be nice to know how other e-com stores are trending. Are we all trending up, trending down by how much percent year over year in our category? Because that would kind of tell us like where the overall market demand is. Uh, another prediction might be, you know, if I'm a, if I'm a restaurant, what is the foot traffic or the sort of drive-through traffic like this time of year, right? September, or in this weather pattern, how much traffic should I expect today? That might tell me what I need for staffing and for, You know, food today versus any other day. And if you just think about like, if you can be smarter and cut waste by 10 to 15% in, in these types of businesses and these types of industries, that's probably gonna add up into like the tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars per year of money saved. And, uh, so I think these businesses are very interesting. This whole like demand prediction, uh, industry is very interesting to me.
Dude, I have done a ton of research in the Trends predict— predicting business. Obviously, like we have this thing called Trends and before launching that I was like, what? What should we do? I think I told you about this years ago, but everything I'm about to say, it's from years ago of research, and I'm doing it mostly off memory. So I'm going to be a little bit off, but not totally off. But have you heard of this company called WGSN? I think I told you about them.
Yeah, they're the ones who like, they like say like the color of the year is lavender and the smell of the year is like, you know, yeah, lily or whatever.
But listen to this. So they're publicly traded. So these numbers are actually facts. So the 2001— sorry, 2021 revenue was £91 million. It's a British company, so £91 million. So I don't know what that would be.
$130.
Yeah, yeah, like I don't know the conversion of Monopoly money to real money, but, uh, no, £91 million. Listen to their adjusted— or their EBITDA was £41 million. So basically for every dollar they made, uh, £45 was like net income profit. And what they do is they tell you which colors are going to be popular. And I'm pretty sure the product— they only have 6,500 customers, so they're paying like $25 grand a year or something like that. And I think the product basically is a quarterly PDF that tells you what colors they think might be popular. And I'm almost positive the way that they get this is they put like tablets at fashion schools and they just ask students like what they're feeling, what they're liking. Things like that. So it's like they're asking fashion people, I guess, the people who are like, I guess they like, like, are you a hipster? Are you a gay guy who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn? Like what? Like whatever you— the qualifications are for, like, you are whatever you think is cool. The normies, you know, like me, are going to like start wearing, you know what I'm saying?
Like, 9 months later, 10 months later.
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, do you— are you an 18-year-old who has 100,000 followers on TikTok? Check. Oh, okay. So like, whatever they think there is going to be cool, that's what they like, what they predict is going to be cool. And, uh, it's just a PDF. And a real-life use case of this is like Starbucks is gonna like make 100,000 uniforms. Millennial pink is the new color, so therefore let's make sure our name tags are this color. So it's a no-brainer to spend $25,000 to get this like quarterly PDF, as well as the ability to like DM someone who works at WGSN and say like, which shade of green is like the thing that we should be using? And so that's an interesting business in this trend predicting, uh, space?
I, um, I talked to somebody who does like a fashion company or whatever and they were like a fashion company or whatever. Yeah. As you can tell, I wear a blue shirt. My fashion sense is frozen in like the third grade, right? Like I was writing cursive the last time I thought about fashion. The, um, and they were like lemons. So in this year. And I was like, what? Like, like, I didn't, I didn't understand. They're talking about—
what does that mean?
A lemon? Like, I thought they're talking about fruit, and they were— I thought they were talking about like literally like what you eat. And they were like, no, as like a print or a pattern or a color. And I was like, okay. I was like, it sounds like you're just making things up. But they just pulled up their dashboard and they were like, no, like, what? Look at the difference between like lemon and pineapple. And it's like lemon— this is like—
pineapples were everywhere recently, weren't they?
It was a bad example, but it was like, you know, basically like you could just pick— is apples hot right now? No, apples, apples are fucking out, dude. Apples are like, you know, they're so out right now. Lemons are so in. Pineapples are so in. Llamas are so in.
It's like, like a picture of a lemon on a shirt. Yeah.
Like a design with a lemon on it or a pattern or whatever. Right.
Like, all right.
Or, you know, same thing with like scents and color palettes and things like that.. And so, and I was like, there's no way. I was like, this is all just like, you know, isn't this just, you know, ad agency fluff? They're just fluffing each other with these like, you know, random ass like things. And they're like, no, like this stuff is like the Bible to us. We, we need to know what people are caring about in order to do that. I don't know if it's this exact WSN or whatever. I don't know if that's the exact one, but they're like, this concept of like knowing which colors, which scents, which, which styles, which are like— dude, is that— are in.
So that's so exhausting.
Yeah, it sounds like a horrible business to be in.
Like, if I'm going to be in the fashion business, I'm going to be in the men's tuxedo business. That shit has not changed for literally 100 years. Have you seen Jack in Titanic? Like, it's the same shit.
I'm going straight big and tall for men because literally the only criteria is like, do you fit? You fit? If you fit, you're in. If you don't fit, you're out. That's your only— I was like, that's what I like. I like a simple yes or no when it comes to fashion. It's just, do you fit or not? Because I just can't find stuff that fits.
Dude, fashion's exhausting. I, I, I— that's not a business I want to be in. Although I do think like there are some brands, you know, a brand freaking crushes it and I never buy any of their stuff though because it's just too expensive. But a Louis Vuitton, Louis Vuitton Uh, they're like suitcases. Louis Vuitton. Yeah, LP. Um, dude, they've crushed it for like 150, 200 years and it's the same ass logo, the same colors, and it's just timeless. I do love those timeless things. They, they do.
There's like a little arbitrage going around. I don't know if you've seen this, but like, uh, with Europe months ago, somebody said this. They're like, because the dollar, the euro like got to parity and the luxury stores hadn't changed their prices. So basically, like, um, things were always typically priced higher in dollars than in euros, uh, or whatever. So I might get that backwards, but like, you— the— a Louis Vuitton bag, you— if you were in Paris, you could buy it in euros for a certain price. That same bag was selling for more that same day if you just sold it in US dollars to a US customer. And in Paris, you would also get the VAT refund. So you'd get you basically net getting something like 30 to 35% under market. And that was like your spread that you could then go and sell it for in the United States. It was like kind of crazy. And so there's like a whole businesses that are around these, like the version of a drug mule. So it's like you can just pay someone who's traveling to like stuff a Louis Vuitton bag in their, in their suitcase and bring it over for you across the border.. And, um, just because like, you know, going, flying to Europe to do this yourself is kind of inconvenient, but there's already people flying from Europe to the US every day. And so there's whole businesses that are based around this, like travel arbitrage and flipping.
I just did, I just did research on one of these that I discovered. It's called Grabr. So the URL is Grabr.io. So they went with like the misspelling and the .io. So, you know, they're really a startup. But it's Grabber.io, and their whole shtick is shop anywhere, travel everywhere. I guess that's a really bad tagline, but basically what it means is it connects you with people who are with these drug mules, these Louis Vuitton mules. It connects you with people who are going to overseas places, and they'll buy shit for you, and you'll give them the money, and it's like a marketplace for that. This is— I've got the stupid example of that. There's this thing called a Wicked Laser. Because I'm like a grown-up.
I'm like, is the wicked part just like yourself describing a standard laser, or is it actually called that?
I'm a 12-year-old with money.
Basically, there's these—
I found this laser online, this laser pointer online that's so strong that they made it illegal in America. And if you shine something like a piece of paper, it catches fire. And you can't have it because it reaches jets in the air and it's a Chinese company. And obviously I saw this laser and it's a $300 laser, but you could only ship it to someone in Canada. And I'm like, I want a laser that can light shit on fire. Like, why do you not want that? That will go perfect in my collection of like tasers. This one laser. I have a BB gun.
A blazer. A blazer from Men's Warehouse. A taser and my laser.
So I had to find someone who would buy this in China for me and get it from Canada to America for my $300 laser. Wow.
You should go work at Grabber.io. That's what you should go do. Yeah.
Yeah. We're just going to sponsor every incel subreddit. Do you like lasers?
Tired of not getting your laser? Tired of driving to Canada for your favorite lasers? Use Grabber. Someone will grab it for you and bring it to you. You're a 12-year-old with money.
This is so stupid.
I saw this TikTok, speaking of cool lasers, I saw this TikTok of a laser pointer that somebody was in their bed and they're pointing it at their light switch and they go, watch this. And they just held it. On the light switch, they go, and they applied just enough pressure to turn it off. And I'm like, this is not real. I was like, I don't know how this is edited, but I was like, the comments were like, that, bro, it's not real. But like, is it? How does that work though? I know this one isn't real, but could it happen? Because imagine not having to get out of your bed to turn your light off at night. Just grabbing your laser pointer off the bed stand and turning your light off.
That's— dude, so just imagine getting an Instagram ad where you see a guy go, watch this, and he shines something across the room and it lights it on fire. That's what I got called with these wicked lasers. Wait, so how did the— wait, how'd the light switch go down?
I don't know, man. I, I never got to the bottom of it. I liked and followed to find out for part 2. They got me. They said if I didn't forward that TikTok to 10 people, my family would die of lasers. So I had to do it.
Oh my God, so stupid.
I want to tell you about another thing that's kind of interesting. So, you know, like, I think you met up with this guy. I think his name is like Strip Mall Guy on Twitter.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I know.
It's really like the same guy.
I'm one of the few people. Yeah. No. Well, Strip Mall Guy, is his fake name supposed to be Trent?
No, there's another guy who's real sure. Maybe they're two different guys.
I think Strip Mall Guy and Strip Mall Guy. Yeah, I met up with the Strip Mall Guy and, uh, we became friends, and so I have to make sure I don't accidentally say his name.
So one of those guys— I forgot which one now, sorry— uh, tweeted about private security. It caught my eye because he goes, uh, man, private security is booming right now. I know so many— like, I've seen so many cops who've retired and, um, are just doing this because it's better money. And I was like, what? Like, okay, tell me more. And so, um, and so I started looking into this and basically, you know, very, very, very briefly, but do you know much about this like private security, uh, like, you know, like trend or industry?
I know that we used to hire them for our events because the insurance made you have one. And you and I had a buddy who we knew who's, or a friend of a friend who started a security business.
Like, did it work?
He tried— no, that one failed, but he tried to make it like sexy. It's like he just needed to do it not sexy. So basically, okay, so there's some big players in this thing. So private security, so there's companies like Securitas, or if you just go to aus.com, it's Allied Universal Security, which I think both of those are multi-billion dollar companies. Yeah, so one's $11 billion, the other one's $7 billion. I think they do everything from like mall cops to airports to events to whatever else. But like, it goes like smaller and smaller and more niche, like down, down as you go, like corporate security. So for example, I remember when I was at, at, um, working at a company, I saw on the CEO's calendar a, a meeting that was like with like the private security detail to go over like the latest updates to the private security. And I was like, you got private security? It's like, well, yeah, like, you know, it's, we're rich, worth a lot. Like, you know, like worth a lot to this company. So the company literally pays for private security for the executives., to be able to, to, you know, to go out and do their thing and be, be safe. And so I found this kind of interesting and it makes it like, it makes sense to me. And, and, uh, it makes sense to me that there's like a private world out there for kind of like retired, either Army, you know, military or police that might be higher paying and potentially, you know, an easier job, um, than what they're doing today.
Who, who are the executives that had security?
Uh, I don't want to say, but are you—
but which company? Did you say the company? I didn't hear you.
No, because that would be easy to figure out at that point.
Yeah, I, uh, you know, like Zuckerberg and Bezos, they release what their security budget is each year, and I think Bezos was $6 million, which is to me not a lot of money.
You know how many people work, uh, work for the Secret Service? No. 6,000. You know how many people they protect? Yeah. You know how many people they protect? 25. 25 people.
To know this information. Dude, I just, no, I met a Secret Service agent at a wedding this weekend and I just asked them everything. I go, tell me everything. And I, you know, they couldn't tell me anything really.
Yeah, I was gonna say, pretty shitty Secret Service guy. He's like, big fan of the pod, happy to share.
They just read out the Wikipedia to me, but like, uh, it was pretty interesting. Um, That's cool. No, I don't know anything about security, but I think it's—
but I think it's— speaking of, uh, speaking of TikTok, there was a TikTok of a guy who saw Jeff Bezos on the corner in Seattle, just like waiting to cross the street. And he's just like, hey Jeff. And he like had his TikTok recording or whatever. And he's like, you know, how's it going today? Whatever. He's like, going fantastic. And he's like, you know, he's ready to like walk across the street. And they go, and somebody in the comments was like, the top comment was like, check out the hand of the security guy. And you look and he had basically a false, I think it was like a false hand. And his— basically his real hand is like in his pocket, like probably holding a gun or a taser of some— some kind of weapon. And he just had like a kind of a fake hand out. And I saw that, I was like, that's awesome. That's awesome, dude.
You know what's even weirder is there was a— I'm a UFC superfan— there was a fight backstage amongst the UFC fighters and security got involved. And I kept wondering, who the fuck is doing UFC security to keep the UFC fighters from not fighting each other. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, what, what, like, what type of job are they getting into? You know what I mean? Like, they just see like something happening and like, what are you going to do?
Well, you saw the woman that Dana White hired, the Best Buy lady. Did you see this?
Yeah, she was a football player. She like kept the woman— or someone was trying to rob the Best Buy and she like got down low and like an O-line, like it was like pushing her out of the way.
Yeah, the robber was trying to run out the store and the security guard from Best Buy just starts blocking this person from getting— this guy from getting out. And he's like, he's desperately trying to get out because he can't just be like stealing and just get caught inside the store. And she just ends up tackling him into like a bunch of boxes. She gets fired from Best Buy because Best Buy's like, hey, uh, liability, you attacked a— you attacked somebody in our store. And she's like, oh my God, I'm doing my job, I'm a security guard at Best Buy, what did you want me to do? And Dana White was like, that's bullshit. Like, he went on Instagram, was like, 'Who is this woman? I want to hire her.' And she's like— now he's like personal security guard or something like that.
Like, she works for them.
Really?
Yeah, dude. I always see those guys and I'm like, who— like, you need like an Israeli-trained like Secret Service agent to like— I mean, who are you gonna have to protect a UFC fighter from hitting another UFC fighter?
Jerry Springer, uh, security guards. They have years of experience breaking this up.
This episode's really good off a tangent, but do you remember how— remember Steve, the security guard from Jerry Springer, who also has a TV show.
Yeah, next to Kevin from The Office or Gilbert Gottfried. Um, oh shoot, I think Gilbert just died actually. RIP. But whatever. Uh, I guess—
did you know that DMX died?
Yeah, dude. Yeah, I saw that. You tweeted out—
why didn't you tell me? You knew this information, you withheld it.
That reminds me of what Dave—
you know, I don't leave my house.
Dave Chappelle was talking about like celebrities and how it's weird they talk to them during tragedies, and he's like, just imagine like 9/11 and, and Ja Rule was like being interviewed actually, and they're like, where— you know, we, we need Ja right now to make sense of this tragedy. Where's Ja?
Where's Ja? Someone go get me Ja.
We need Ja to make sense of this strategy, this tragedy. That's what— that's like you're wondering like Why didn't anyone fill me in that DMX had passed? Uh, but yeah, he's, he's dead.
By the way, did you see this? Uh, this blog post is, we'll close on this little last random thing, but, um, check out this blog post. So this guy listened to the episode that we did with Rob Dyrdek, which is probably, I don't know if not the most popular episode we did, one of the most popular episodes we've done. Uh, people love that one. And one of the things that Rob, one of the reasons people love it is because Turns out the kind of fun-loving skater guy from MTV, like, turns out he is like an absolute nut when it comes to personal productivity and like personal efficiency. Yeah. You know, his quote on there was, I am human optimization. And one of the things he had said was that he writes his wife a handwritten note every day. And so this guy wrote this blog post. It was like the top post on Hacker News over the weekend. And it's called Write a Note to Your Spouse Every Day. A note, a note a day keeps the divorce attorney away. And he goes, um, you know, I was listening to My First Million and, uh, Rob Dyrdek was on there. He says that, uh, he writes a note to his wife every day because sometimes, uh, otherwise she would be the last person to hear from him at the end of the day about what he was working on, how he was feeling. He was usually tired by then and wasn't really giving it, you know, his A+. So he goes, for the last 6 months, I wrote a, a, a note to my wife every single day. He goes, all right, that's a lie. You know, I did it most days, but like, whatever. Here's how it went. And he goes, it's amazing. We're on the same page about what's going on in our lives, our kids, our finances, how we're spending our time. We talk more than ever now. We have more trust, we feel less stress, we're less aggravated with each other, and we're better parents because we're kind of more in communication with ourselves about parenting. And he goes, here's why. Writing is thinking. So just writing helped me clear my mind. It wasn't just me dumping my thoughts onto her. It was me getting my own mind clear. And he gives this outline. He goes, here's what I write. First, I write gratitude, like something about her, you know, for her, for how hard she works, for her looks, whatever. Then what I'm working on today, uh, and like my goals or my deadlines, anything I'm excited about, anything that's bothering me, uh, any ideas I have, just like random ideas on my head about parenting or fixing stuff around the house. Um, transactional stuff like, oh, we need to remember to do this. We have to do this. Don't forget that. Questions like, hey, are we going to that thing? Or, hey, did we ever book that? You know, hey, do we have an event coming up? And lastly, again, gratitude for the life we have, the things we have, the time we have, the kids we have, et cetera. I don't do all these sections every day, but those are the general categories of things I try to write. It takes me just about 30 minutes if I'm not distracted. And, you know, it's been a huge win for me.
Is it like a physical note or an email?
I think it's a Physical note. Uh, not 100% sure.
I guess I should start doing this. That sounds pretty cool.
Right. And then he did this YouTube video with his wife, like where they both like talked about afterwards, cuz the post blew up on Hacker News. It got like probably, you know, 100,000 views or something like that. And so then they like did an interview together, like talking about this little habit.
It's pretty cool, right? Yeah. This is awesome. Uh, I just DM'd him while you were talking saying this is, uh, amazing. And this is a really good headline. Reddit noted. Write a note to your spouse every day. A note a day keeps a divorce attorney away. This is a really good title. This is a beautiful find. Um, I think, I guess I'll start doing this, right? This is pretty sick. It sounds smart.
Maybe I'll start by talking to her, then I'll start.
No, this seems like a no-brainer. I'm like reading this and I'm like, huh, all upside, pretty much no downside. Why am I not doing this? Right?
Good for me. Uh, you know, How can I weasel out of doing this? All right, my brain's not coming up with any valid reason not to do this.
No, like the calculations are like going in my head.
I'm like, huh, yeah, you seem like a good husband. You, you probably already do this. You probably leave a sticky note on her pillow every morning. No, not at all.
I, as I was reading it, same thing. I was like, why would I not do this? It seems really obvious, but apparently no one does it. My first—
except Rob, your husband. One episode at a time. I feel like we had to, we had to leave them with something useful because we definitely got off on like, you know, a tangent's tangent during this episode.
Dude, it worked for Rob. I mean, Rob is like successful. Have you seen his wife? I mean, she's very beautiful. I'm pretty sure she was like a playmate, uh, like a, like a, like a, I don't know what the word is, Playboy model or something. I mean, she's like, uh, pretty, pretty amazing.
Oh yeah.
Wow.
I'm definitely doing this now. Yeah.
I, yeah, I guess I'll do that.
Why did this guy write so many words?
Just put a picture up, be done. Well, anyhow, it's like, if you Google, here's how you, here's one of the ways that I knew that Rob was like crazy rich. If you Google Rob Dyrdek home, there's like 13 different articles and it's like all about like a different house, like $10 million house.
Did you mean homes? Did you mean mansions?
Yeah. And he buys all these houses and, uh, he seems happy. He's got his act together. So yeah, I'm on board, I guess. I guess I'll do this.
Fine.
All right.
We're out.