#42 - Wall Street Bets & Tesla Shorts, Curating Job Boards & Executive Recruitment Firms
Uh, did your thing go viral?
The Amazon dating thing? Yeah. It's all relative, but I am— it— the— compared to what I'm used to.
I saw that same link in like 5 other groups I was in. I don't know if they saw it through you or not, but, um, that link is spreading.
Yeah, I don't— I don't— I have no idea if I was the catalyst, but I'm just trying to play the— this Twitter game. It's a game to me at this point, and, uh, I'm trying to crack it, crack the code. Nice. We're gonna give this a go. We're gonna try 3 times a week. Our goal, Sean and I's goal, is to hit 100,000 listens per episode.
100,000, baby!
100,000, we are—
Per episode?
Per episode. I don't wanna reveal where we are now.
Okay, that's fine.
But I think we can hit it. But we're gonna need help, so please share and get people on this. And then we're gonna have video clips coming soon, which will hopefully help. So let's kick this off by, let's bring up some news stuff, and then I have a whole bunch of opportunities I wanna go over, and I think you do as well, right?
Yeah, I got a couple.
Yeah, so what happened? They tried to sell the company and FTC stepped in and said no.
Yeah, FTC blocked it and I read the report. Basically what it said is Edge, is it Edgewell? Edgewell and Glick are the two biggest guys. Edgewell wants to buy it for over a billion dollars. FTC blocked it, they said it's gonna be a monopoly.
How could this be a monopoly, right?
Because here's why, I read the report, they put buying razors online in one category and buying them in stores in another category., and they only looked at stores. So they didn't say Amazon was competition. They said Target. They looked at— they talked about Target and things like that.
Gotcha. So they would monopolize the in-store component.
Yeah, I actually think it's bullshit.
That's a silly way of doing it.
It's bullshit. But so what happened was— this is what I'm getting at with this— Harry's got blocked and Casper is going public at half of the valuation in which they raised money at.
Right.
Not good for this whole D2C thing. My prediction is, and I think many people have this prediction, is that the DTC companies, what they're going to have to do is go the route of getting sold to PE companies. Right. And which means it's going to be ruthlessly prioritized of profits. Profits. So like 5, 10 times profit. I think it's a good thing.
Yeah. I had the founder of LifeAid or FitAid. They have a bunch of drinks. It's basically a beverage company on and he sold to PE and he sold, I think, when they were at like roughly $30 million in sales or something like that. And now it's much bigger than that. And so, and he, and you know, his path was so— it wasn't— didn't take a miracle, you know what I mean? Like, he made a good product, he distributed it through CrossFit and others, and then he had the, he had the financials in place where they— it wasn't like Casper where it's like the marketing expenses are just so out of control that the business just doesn't make any sense.
Where was that company located?
Here, like Santa Clara or whatever.
Like, that's a good idea to be located in a different place, in San Francisco or New York. Right. Casper shouldn't be in Manhattan. You don't need customer service people in Manhattan. That's so stupid. Right. So this, this, this thing is going to be a, um, this is going to be interesting. We'll have to talk about this later about how it's going to impact these direct-to-consumer companies, because for a long time they were being valued at a revenue multiple, which is not right for most.
Yeah. The real question is what's, what's happened since. So for example, um, you know, Dollar Shave Club sells to, I think, Unilever, uh, for a billion dollars. That didn't get blocked. Uh, they do all online and, um,— you know, the question is, does that— is Unilever writing that off 3 years from now, or is it now worth $3 billion or whatever? And so if you're a DTC company today, you're really hoping with fingers crossed that some of these other acquisitions, like we talked about the Native acquisition, right, gets bought by Procter Gamble, and revenue has soared since then because the Procter Gamble machine was able to take Native and like pump it into Target and do more things with it. And so, you know, they're looking back at that and they're saying that was a good buy. And that's what needs to happen, is some of these need to come out successful. This is what happens— in tech, right? Google buys YouTube. Everyone thinks it's a horrible deal at the time. Billion dollars. They just broke out their revenue.
$14 billion.
So, with acquisitions, my theory, er, and I definitely stole it from someone, but with acquisitions, most acquisitions are either gonna be 10x, like they buy it for one number and it's, in a few years, it's worth 10 times that, or zero.
Right off. Yeah.
That's typically how they become. Rarely is it a okay. Right. It's either amazing or horrible.
And I see one of the reasons now, 'cause I'm now inside of a big company for a bit, and I can see how the decisions get made. And one thing is that when you acquire something and it's sort of smallish to medium relative to the big company, it needs to either grow big or focus gets lost. And they're like, well, these resources are not, this is not worth it at this— we don't want to just run this standalone business that's small to medium. We need this to move the needle for us. The problem is the bigger you get, the harder it is for the needle to move at all, right? So, you know, like for example, I'm at Twitch right now. Twitch was bought by Amazon. AWS, they had some crazy numbers for their revenue and, you know, it's a phenomenal business. It's very hard, I think truthfully, for Twitch to like meaningfully affect, uh, Amazon's like business. So it's more strategic value than it is like— the revenue from a small acquisition being a needle mover for such a huge company.
Has it been a needle mover?
For a company of Amazon's size? No. And so— but there's strategic value, right? Because it's like the biggest gaming platform out there for live video. So there's a live video angle, there's a gamers angle. And if you're Amazon and you're trying to sell to everybody in a household, it's like you need products for moms, you need products for dads, products for the sons. And right, like all of that ties into why I should be a Prime member. And so there's strategic value in owning the largest gaming, you know, live, live gaming community. But, um, it's very hard to, to move the needle on an Amazon, Facebook, Google-sized company, or in the DDC world, Unilever, Procter Gamble, whatever.
Let's bring up two more things going on. Okay. Um, do you know what WallStreetBets is?
No.
Okay. Um, it's a subreddit and it's—
yeah, I have seen that.
What is it? They described it themselves as 4chan meets Wall Street. No. Oh, I know how they say it. They say if 4chan had a Bloomberg terminal. Okay, so they call themselves retards and autistic. That's what like they— like all the headlines are like, right, we're a bunch of like, you autistics are buying too much of the Tesla stock. And so it's, uh, kind of shitheads, uh, hilarious, right? And they post their Robinhood account of like they just like bought like $50,000 in options even though they're in debt and it just went up to $2 million. Or some people are like, well, I just lost a million dollars. And the joke that they do is Oh shoot, I'm in debt to Robinhood. Well, I'll just delete the app and create a new account. Like, it's crazy. These guys are like total shitheads, but it's so funny to laugh.
So you lurk there? Yeah.
Yeah, it's at like $900 or something as of this morning.
Morning. I think it was $700.
Oh, wow. $700 dropped again.
Oh, it dropped. I didn't— I didn't pay too much.
Henry, can we get Tesla stock price? Because I think, you know, it's been— the line is a vertical line.
7:30.
7:30. And it was— what was the high before this? It was at 7:30 now. Last night, uh, well, the high was $9.61. $9.61, right?
Crazy, crazy volatile. Um, it 3x'd in the last 30 days, I believe. Uh, and some people think that it's because of this WallStreetBets. These guys are crazy. Like, it's just normal people. There was a video on WallStreetBets of this girl in college buying $30,000 in options in class, and she was like blogging about using it.
It's wild. So, so, okay, so I was looking at this this morning because I was like, what the hell is going on with Tesla? Because I sold my shares at like $285 or something like that, and, um, which was good for me, I doubled. But, but the— I never thought this would happen. In fact, I thought more likely the company goes bankrupt than this. And so I was trying to figure out what's going on, and nobody knows. But, um, I had heard the term short squeeze a lot, and like, you've heard— have you heard like of what a short squeeze is? So For those who don't know, so shorting a stock is basically betting that you think the value of the stock will go down. So the way, the way it works is you essentially borrow somebody's current shares and you sell them on the market. And, and then if the, if, you know, if the, if the share price goes down, you're going to end up making money. And a lot of people borrow money to do shorts. So Tesla is the most shorted public stock, I believe, in the, in the US stock market.
And the people who are shorting it, it's a lot of really smart people, I think, and a lot of big institutional shorts. Griffin, Larry Griffith. I mean, like a lot of like huge billionaire hedge funds.
Yeah, there's these guys who basically make their name. They just short a couple stocks and they just hold it for 2 years and they just wait for it to go down. That's how they make all their money. So Tesla's that stock. And Elon has famously been like on a rampage against shorts. He thinks short selling is like immoral or whatever.
So anyway, actually, he mailed a pair of shorts to one of the shorts. Yeah, I saw that. I forget the guy's name.
And so, so it puts a lot of pressure on the stock to have all these shorts. But what ends up happening is that as the stock price goes up, —what ends up happening is the shorts have to do, you know, cover their position, which means they need to, like, sort of get out of the short game. In order to do that, they need to buy shares at the current price because they borrowed earlier and they have to cover their position. So what ends up happening is that as the stock starts to go up, if short sellers en masse start to cover their position, it drives the price up even more. And so this is what, you know, what it looks like is happening. And I'm not a stock market guy. I'm a startup guy. So somebody out there who knows about stocks, like, you got it all wrong. But I am pretty sure I understand, which is that What's happening is it's a giant short squeeze. There was so much short action, and as the price was going up, they all had to cover their position, which just drives the price even higher. And so it's not that people— it's not that new people have this irrational confidence that Tesla's going to go up. It's that the shorts are getting burned so bad that they had to sell to— they had to cover their position. And that's driving the price up in this, like, unnatural kind of way. And that's why the stock— the chart was like vertical. That's mind-boggling.
Can you go to—
just go to YouTube and look up what is a short squeeze? And it's like a Like I'm describing it in words, but there's like a 2-minute video that's much better at explaining.
You go look up Reddit WallStreetBets. Tell me how many subscribers are in that subreddit. It's— I'm going to guess like 40,000.
That's my guess. That'd be more than 1,000.
Can you tell me? You know how to see that? It's on the far right of when you Google Reddit WallStreetBets.
By the way, shout out to Henry. We now have Henry with us to help us with the pod and answer all of our questions.
He's our Google. 828,000. 800,000 in this subreddit. Um, you have to go and go deep on it. Um, in the comment section, they're saying things like, I'm gonna— like, one guy got a tattoo of Elon Musk and they like make him look like Jesus. Another guy was like, I'll eat a live chicken if it gets above 900, and it got above 900 yesterday. They're gonna do— they're like gonna do it. Yeah. And they— and then subtitles, they'll be like, you autistics are driving Tesla up, like, let's keep it going.
Yeah, it's just a bunch of shitheads and it's so funny. Yeah, it's very entertaining. Let's do one more.
And by the way, if you are a Tesla skeptic like me who believes basically great product, but there's some financial engineering going on and on the finance side, follow this guy Josh Wolfe on Twitter and go down the rabbit hole of his tweets and the people he talks to. There is very compelling evidence that there's some shenanigans going on.
Yeah, it's incredibly interesting. Um, and then you want to bring up Drew Houston?
Yeah, this is like a quick one. Uh, Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox, got, uh, was appointed on the board of Facebook. And when I read this stuff, I'm like, okay, I don't care what happened, but I'm like, why do people do that? What is that? Like, how do they pick these guys? Why would I want to join the board? Do they make money? Like, whatever. And I just, so I went and just sort of found out, uh, to join the board of Facebook, this is all public info. Yeah, go for it. What do you think you make for just sitting on the board? Which means You know, sort of a quarterly commitment.
Okay, so Facebook's the biggest company in the world, or one of. Yeah. Okay, so not the biggest, but one of, yeah. Top 20, top 10, I don't know what it is. I think you get $5 million a year. I think you get $5 million a year.
So $700,000 and you get what? I mean, $700,000 in cash?
I think it's like stock compensation in the company.
And you just have to show up once a quarter.
It's my understanding that the obligation is essentially you attend the quarterly board meeting and, you know, the board is responsible for firing and hiring the CEO.
But you can be on multiple boards. Yes. So there's professional board members. Hillary Clinton was that. So she was on the board of Walmart. Yeah. When she was— when Bill Clinton was just the governor of Arkansas. And I bet she could have made millions of dollars a year being on 4 or 5, 6 boards. Right.
I mean, you kind of already have to be somebody, but it's like this is the side hustle. Of the rich and prestigious, um, thing to do. It's like, oh yeah, my side gig, I make, you know, half a million bucks or a million dollars a year sitting on boards on it as well, I think. Yeah, like, you know, a lot of people, what they do is they take, you know, successful people like Jack Dorsey was on the board of Disney or whatever. And, um, the other thing they do is like retired army generals and stuff. Uh, I'm not sure exactly why, but like that's also one of the categories of people who gets to sit on boards.
God, that's crazy. I bet And there's definitely like you— he could probably— I mean, that guy already has that network, but just being on a board of a large company, think of like who you would get to hang out with, right? It'd be crazy. I mean, like, it's kind of funny that Drew— I don't know him, but he was just like a Y Combinator geek like a few years ago. Now he's probably on this board and a few other boards that has a publicly traded company. He's probably like— can— his life is very different. It's just crazy. I heard a story about him. I had a friend of a friend and he was like, yeah, we went to his house the other day and it was because we went to a concert and we went to like a Pearl Jam concert and then afterwards it was me and him and—
He's a great singer. Is he? Yeah, I thought that's where the story was going. No, he's a great singer.
He's like, we went to his house and we invited like the Chains— what's it called? Chainsmokers. Yeah, he's like, they came to our house. We were all just hanging out. These nerds get access to all this thing. It's pretty cool. Yeah, I was at this party once and he was—
he had just been there and my friend was telling me, he's like, he just left, but he was on the piano. He's like, Drew House, amazing pianist and singer.
Turns out the nerds are ruling the world. Okay, you want to go into some opportunities?
Yeah, really random one. So I haven't had time to really look into this, but I— it was so like, it just caught my eye. So it's the top of mind thing, right? Without looking at my phone. So, you know, in every business, you probably have one here., in the kitchen or wherever, you have this poster that's like the labor laws. It's like California labor laws, here's your rights as an employee. The minimum wage. It says the minimum wage, and so these posters you have to buy every year. Um, no, I think they give it to us, don't they? Uh, so most businesses buy them, and so there's some, uh, and so you pay like $28 for these. Um, and so there's this, uh, I ran into this guy, a friend of a friend, who basically, um, he— this is his business. He makes these posters 4 companies, every place of business needs one or multiple of these. And, um, it's like 99% renewal rate, uh, of customers on subscription basically every year to get the updated thing. And, uh, so I went down the rabbit hole of like trying to figure out what are all these, is it local players? Is there one big player? And I stumbled onto this company that I thought it was kind of cool. Uh, it started off called, um, GovDocs or something like that. GovDocs. GovDocs, G-O-V-Docs. And, you know, based in Minnesota, started in 1999 doing this like posters. They print posters, they do it. And that did like a few million dollars a year. And that's just kind of an amazingly easy way to make a few million dollars a year. And then they sort of upgraded it and they were like, okay, first, like, you don't need to just rebuy it every year. You only need to buy it when the rules change. And we'll tell you— so we'll just tell you when the rules change if you buy on subscription. So that was like a good thing. And then they actually have this other business they spun out called GovDelivery, which I thought was kind of interesting. So it's government tech. So basically it's MailChimp for governments. So every state, city, county, whatever, has a bunch of constituents on an email list that they— or SMS or physical mail— that they need to contact to communicate basic rules, information, road closures, whatever it may be. And so these guys are like, oh yeah, we'll be the tech for you to power that system. And now they're just embedded in like all these cities. They'll never get swapped out. It's probably like super, super defensible. And they're doing like $20 million plus a year subscription business. And. And it's literally like a bunch of Joe Schmoes in Minnesota who started this. And, um, we'll file this away under boring businesses that are kind of amazing. I love that.
That's great. And so here's something, um, first of all, there's all these rules that I had no idea existed. I've definitely broken a lot of them because I literally didn't know. I didn't— wasn't trying to. Yeah. But like, for example, if you interview someone who— even if you just interview them, not hire them, but if you interview someone who's international, you, I believe, you gotta follow a whole different set of rules. For example, I think you need to even do something like, you have to have the CEO's salary posted publicly. Right. Um, have you heard of this?
Yeah, there's all kinds of compliance. There's that, there's other ones I've encountered with a previous startup, which was, oh, before you sign this contract with a vendor, you must run a newspaper ad for 22 days with a request for proposal, um, for other vendors. Just to make sure this is on the up and up.
Yeah, there's so many of these rules. Crazy. And when I signed up— so we use Rippling now for payroll. I've used Gusto, which was good too. Um, there's so many rules, I don't even know which ones I'm breaking, right? Like, for example, if you have remote employees in Texas or Idaho, which we have, we have to file a whole bunch of paperwork there, and I didn't even know that, right? And I'm thankful that we've hired someone to help us figure all this out, but I had to hire You should use this company.
So there's a startup I'm desperate to invest in because I love the founder, this guy Alex. He's amazing. And I started using the product to do this. So, so I hired up a contractor, uh, uh, uh, Ishan, who's our, like, my right-hand man now. I call him chief of staff, but he's the only staff, so he's just like chief. And so he's like my right-hand man to do whatever. And, you know, he's in Australia. I gotta, I gotta set up a contract. I gotta set up payments with him, and then I gotta comply with whatever the taxation and sort of local laws are. Oh, and that's international. I don't even know. So there's, there's national and international. So this Product is called Deal, D-E-E-L. And so the website I think is letsdeal.com. And, um, literally I went on there. This is gonna sound like an ad, but I'm like that much of a raving fan of this that I'm like, yes, here's a free ad. I went on there and literally within 5 minutes I had set up a contract. It had emailed him for all his information, collected that, put it in the system of record. It knew, okay, he's in Australia, so here's all the things you need to comply with that we're gonna do for you automatically. Link your bank account, and every month you'll be paying this guy properly. And, uh, and like, last week— Deal? Deal. How do you spell that? D-E-E-L. So the URL is letsdeal.com. Is this a new company? New startup. They're signing up companies like crazy. Um, and now I know why, because A, this is a real problem, and B, the user experience is so fucking smooth, it was unbelievable.
If you know the guy who runs Deal, D-E-E-L, email me before you email Sean. I already know him.
You know him? I text him, yeah.
Oh, that's a great idea, man. I like that. It's a fantastic idea.—
and so, uh, I'm pumped. In fact, I went in because I was gonna give my guy a bonus, because he did some good things for me this month, and I went in, I was like, "I don't know if this is gonna— this is a startup, it's not gonna be able to support this, like, am I gonna have to make a new contract, a second contract?" And literally, I opened up the dashboard, and it's like, "It's almost time to pay. By the way, if you want to add a bonus, here's a button." I went there, it's like, "Here's a bonus. How much? Is it a one-time or recurring? And what for?" How many people work? Done. I don't know how many people they have.
Like, is it literally just like a guy?
No, no, no, it's a company, it's a startup. They had seed funding. That's great. It's not an easy thing to do. No, they have a team of staff for—
on Trends works in Bali, right? But she's Canadian. It's a whole mess. And she's a— technically she's a contractor. They have to be contractors, right? But then there's all the rules, like they can't— you can't direct them too much, I believe, or they can't have access to the company credit card, right? And I didn't know about any of these things. It's very complicated to figure that out. And with the rise of remote work, let's see what's gonna happen.
Right. And in general, the theme here, the opportunity theme here, I would say is compliance. Compliance is boring, it's unsexy, but everybody needs to do it. And it's the last thing a business owner wants to deal with. And so if you can offer turnkey compliance, I think that's a big deal. And there's that.
And so we're talking about turnkey compliance with employees. There's all other types of compliance that works, that is interesting. So for example, when I was in college, I was getting a an alcohol online liquor store setup, and I had to hire a company just to teach me how to do that. Right. And so compliance for all types of categories could be quite big. We should actually— we should cover that another time, go more in depth about different compliance businesses.
Yeah, there's several.
I think that's interesting. Okay. Did you read what I talked about executive search?
I read what you were talking about, but you should explain it.
It's interesting. Okay. I learned about this guy named . The reason why I was interested in this person is he owns this company called , I believe it's called, and it's an executive search company. And so let me pull up my notes here, but here's what it does. It's quite simple. So if I have a company that ranges— the range that they do is $10 million up to billions, I think they do. If I have a company that's in that size, which I do, and I need to hire an executive that I'm gonna pay $500,000 to, I tell what I need, and they go out and give me a bunch of candidates, and I'll eventually hire to hire one, it takes them 90 days to do so. When they go out and find people, they get paid typically a percentage, sometimes a flat fee. Their fee ranges from $100 grand to $200 grand. But there are maybe 15 in the space. The top 10, a lot of them are publicly traded, they'll do billions in revenue. This whole business is entirely run mostly by hand and relationships. Non-tech. There's no tech behind it. And the way that appears to have run it is it just makes like, it potentially on $200 million in sales, could make, it could make, if you told me it made $70 to $80 million in profit a year, I would not be shocked. Right. Very profitable, all this. Let me give you some stats. I talked to, I called a whole bunch of people who worked in the industry and I found out about it. Okay, so typical fees that they earn is $100,000 to $125,000 per placement. Per placement. The average headhunter, they can do 7 searches at a time. The ballers can do 20 searches at a time. And they could do about 10 to 20 a year. The average search takes around 90 days to fill. I asked them why haven't they just hired 10,000 recruiters then, and the answer was, well, it's just like pretty profitable right now, and so they'd rather just use that cash to do other stuff. And revenues each year tend to be really, really stable, similar to the year before with slight growth. And what else? I asked them what the downsides are. It's not recession-proof. The fastest growing or the hardest— the fastest growing/hardest to fill position at the moment right now is data scientists. Right.
So this would be an executive-level data scientist, like a chief scientist basically in that case, or is it just—
Executive or director, high. Director level. Okay. High enough that they're making $400,000 in salary. Right.
Otherwise it's not worth a firm to fill it. So I've actually heard this in general. Oh, and cannabis. Okay, those are the bigger client— new clients. Yeah. So, uh, I've actually heard this about, uh, data scientists and applied scientists, uh, quite a bit now. There's a— seems to be a shortage, and the, uh, the wages are like incredible for applied scientists or data scientists. And so I think, you know, Lambda School and some others are trying to add data science to their program, or already have added this. Um, but I think that's one where there's a labor shortage, and I think that's one where there's probably like you can sort of bootstrap off of new jobs and new, new executive roles, um, if you wanted to compete with the incumbent players, right? Because the incumbent players already have the relationships with existing companies. So cannabis, like a new industry that's popping up, is where you would want to start. Or they already have like the Rolodex of all the CMOs, so you don't want to be placing CMOs. You want to be placing data science, a role that didn't even exist 10 years ago. And so that's like how I would think about wedging my way into the space if I wanted to.
Yeah, so I asked my guy I talked to a bunch of people and I asked my folks, what's the barrier to entry here? Relationships. That's what it was. It was relationships. Most people in these types of industries who have been in there for a long time say, when I ask, well, why hasn't digital came in? And they say, well, it just doesn't work that way. Mostly I think that's untrue. Not that digital will necessarily make things better, but I always believe there's a space to automate things, right? And I think they don't think that because they've just been in it for so long and but a fresh perspective totally can make things different in many cases, not all, many. Like, it hasn't happened yet in legal, right? And people are trying. But anyway, I'm— yeah, I was thinking about this whole process. It was really interesting to me, and like, it could be as simple as you just have a massive email list of interesting people and you just email when there's a position, and you're able to like speed up the process of actually finding these people.
Well, so yesterday, or the day before, one of the founders of Stripe I think Patrick Collison maybe tweeted out, hey, I'm restarting my job, my internal like job board basically, which is basically like if you're super interesting, like if I think you're interesting and you're thinking about moving on to another role, I'm going to make a shortlist of people that are super interesting and a shortlist of roles that are super interesting. And I think that people with a lot of clout, like the founder of Stripe, are very well positioned to do things like this in ways that other people could not. And so I just find that interesting where there's these like little manual you know, sort of like mom-and-pop versions of these that are started by people with influence.
Yeah, so I actually launched one of those a while ago, and I didn't pursue it because I didn't get traction right away. But there's this thing called The Ladders. Have you heard of The Ladders?
The what, the job website?
Yeah, it was positioned as jobs that are $100K or more. It was, uh, they got in trouble for some scams, and I don't know if it— if they were good people, but that kind of clouded people's perception of it, but basically it was $100,000 jobs, and I think the job seeker, the applicant, would pay a monthly fee. Mm-hmm. So what I created, I just called it Jobs. I could call it Sam's Jobs or something, and I actually think this would work now that I have a bigger following, but where I or someone who I approve of curates companies and roles and explains what the role and job is, is about. And the reason why I think that's interesting is because right now you can find jobs at LinkedIn, on Glassdoor, things like that, but that's controlled typically by either disgruntled ex-employees or the company. So your information is by definition pretty biased. Right. And I kind of thought it was interesting is why don't you have an editorial group of people give their opinions and what they can say is if you're young and hungry and want to work yourself to death but have huge opportunity, this place is an interesting.
Okay, okay, I really like this. So, so what you're saying is, okay, normal job board or posting, company's just always gonna say everything is great, here's all the great things. Yeah, like Glassdoor, it's gonna be the mostly disgruntled people who go and leave very vocal bad reviews. It's the minority, that's maybe not gonna be your experience. So what you're saying is almost like a Consumer Reports for the workplace. And what you would do is you would say, I'm gonna go interview 25 people from this company. I'm going to take them out to lunch. I'm going to get their opinion on a battery of things. I'm going to try to get a sample of people who are at the company and they're not the— they're not the cheerleaders who are just going to say positive things or the disgruntled Joes. And I'm going to try to suss out the actual like pros, cons list of this company.
I love this idea. Yeah. And I launched this. I got a few people to pay $300 a year for it. This is what helped lead me to the idea of Trends, right? Because I was doing this for companies and people were saying, I would rather just invest or start these companies. I don't want to work there. But I still think this has legs. I just haven't gotten to it yet. And the reason why is some people are recently mom and dads and they just want to work a 9-to-5, right? And so there's loads of companies that are great for that. Exactly. They'll pride themselves on that, but they're not gonna say that, right?
You want to see Facebook has a policy that lets you take, you know, 6 months off if you're, you know, a dad and it's paternity leave, and you can freeze your eggs and they'll pay for that. And you don't want to go see that.
Yeah, people who are family builders, right? And then there's other ones where it's like a young kid and he says to himself, I want to be around alpha males or alpha females, right? I want to take over the world. I don't like— I have my moral compass is a little bit developing. So, you know what I mean? And then it's like, okay, well, here's like these aggressive companies, maybe a banking position, right? That kind of fit that because that's what was me, dude.
I would fund this company today. In fact, I have two people I'm going to text after this and be like, Hey, you've been asking me for something, like, here's an idea that you should run with.
Mine might be up still. It's called Sam— it might be samsjobs.co.
But were you doing this where you were, you were profiling the companies either from afar or by talking to people who were there and putting that information out there? samsjobs.co. I love it.
Yeah, and I was tinkering with it, and I just haven't gotten around— I— we launched it in the hustle, like, in a beta.
You were trying to get who to pay for it.
I think that the seekers will pay for it because that's the only way to give them truth. So there's a line because if companies pay— I'm looking at my, my recommendations, looks like I recommended Flexport and I said why Flexport I think is interesting. What I like about them, Ryan Peterson has been in the industry for years, so I researched the founder. He previously had a company in the industry. Paul Graham, who's a very respected investor, said he's betting big on this company and they raised— at the time they had only raised $200 million in funding. So this was a few years ago. That I wrote this, and I thought it was interesting because they only had 100 employees, so it was kind of stable. That's a little bit of room, right? And so this would be perfect for someone who wasn't entirely risky, but a little bit risky. And I just wrote this profile on why I think it's interesting. And then I found a quote where Ryan said, this company is either going to be worth $10, $20 billion or we're going to go out of business in 4 years. Right. So I was like, all right, if that fits your appetite, this is why it's interesting. Yeah, I love this idea.
Okay, great. Let's, let's move on. That's a, that's a great idea.
What else you got? That's all I got, brother. What do you got? Maybe let's look at what I was thinking when we were doing this in the the future, I think what we should do is stick to one category.
Ah, one each time. Yeah. Okay. I like that. Uh, there's some funny ones on here. Uh, all right. So you were just talking about the, um, you're talking about the sort of job find, you know, the job seeker thing. Yeah. So tell me about Levels. Is this guy, I think he's LevelsIO on Twitter. This dude basically was like a big champion of remote work. I don't know where he lives. He lives somewhere international. And there's a lot of people who want this vagabond lifestyle where you like travel around the world, you work remotely, you're a freelancer. So he has a Slack community that he charges like, I don't know, $10 a month to be in. He's making 6 figures, you know, easily just off his Slack. And, but he created this website called levels.fyi. And levels.fyi, what it does is it says, okay, I work at Google, I'm an engineer, I'm level 6, here's my, here's what I make, here's my base, here's my stock, and oh, by the way, I'm in Austin. And then somebody else would be like, I'm a Google level 6 engineer in San Francisco, and then you see the difference there. So it's this dataset of people anonymously putting in their compensation, and the dataset gets richer and richer. So it's actually a fairly reliable resource to say, oh, you know, should I go work at Facebook or Google? I think I'm this level. I can see the pay difference between the two.
So I think that's just a cool product.
I think it's just a guy who created this, maybe with a friend, I don't know. Like, it's not a very, like, complicated website. It's very simple, but it's extremely useful. And it is, and I believe It is the best way to figure out how much could I make at this company, or how much am I underpaid or overpaid for my role at this company right now. Um, because companies keep you in the dark on that stuff. So, um, so I think that's like an amazing little resource and I think it should go further, more like with the idea you were talking about where you need editorial.
Yeah.
You, if you had somebody who's saying, I'm going to, I'm going to give people the truth about what it's like to work at this company, which is, um, what's the environment like? What's the work-life balance like? What, you know, how was it like to what is the culture, engineering culture there, whatever. But you could also do things like, for example, when we joined Amazon, I learned, oh, Amazon has a stock vesting schedule that goes 5% year 1, 15% year 2, 40%, 40% year 3 and 4. It's like super backloaded. And like other companies are like, you know, whatever, 33, 33, 33, 33. So it kind of makes a difference, but you find out this info so late in the game. I would have loved to just known some of this stuff up up front, and anybody who works there would tell you, look, this is how the compensation works at Amazon. I'm not telling you secret privileged information, I'm telling you like the base structure of things that you can either find out after you go through the whole process, or I could just tell you right now. So I think there's a lot of information that you could add to this site that would make it like, just like an amazing resource that doesn't exist today. Yeah, I'm very interested in this. Yeah. What'd you think of this, the Ringer selling to Spotify?
Yeah, so the Ringer sold to Spotify. I don't know what the revenue numbers are. I heard $20 million a year. Last, last reported around $15-20 million. Um, it depends. If they bought it for more than $100 million, I think it's a stupid deal.
I think they bought it for much more than $100 million. The number that was previously leaked was $150 million, and the number rumored for this was closer to $300 million, which I don't know if it was real or not, but that's a rumor.
Mind-boggling. If that's the case, then— so right now Sean and I are building the studio here I'm gonna go and find 30 podcasters to do it. Okay, so what do I think about it? First, let me tell you about what I know about Barstool, which is the most similar company. Barstool claimed to have— God, I gotta remember these numbers off the top of my head. I didn't write it down. I think they have 25 podcasts. Across those 25 podcasts, I think they made $25 million in revenue. So something like— or no, sorry, 15 podcasts, I believe, $15 million in sales. Whatever it was, it came out to be something like a million dollars in revenue per podcast. So then you ask yourself, well, just have like 50 of them.
Here's why you're wrong. If you buy The Ringer in your Spotify, you're not buying it so that you can make ad revenue off the sponsorships in the podcast, right? What Spotify's thinking is, oh my god, we, you know, we've done what we can in music, we're gonna keep growing that core business. Where does Spotify grow? Oh, we're not just music, we're audio. What other big category of audio is there?— one of them is podcasts. And so that's why they bought Anchor, that's why they bought, um, Gimlet. They bought one more called Pod—
Podcast. I love it.
I listen to podcasts all the time. And, uh, so they started buying this up, and what they're trying to do is they're saying, look, people by default are going to go to the default podcast apps, but if we have the key—
those are— what you've just described, Anchor is the only podcast app, right? Right. But Gimlet, for example, the others are just production companies, right?
So if your content, right, because because podcast listeners want the content. They want to listen to their favorite podcasts. If yours is exclusively on Spotify, you're gonna start listening on Spotify, right? Like, for example, Bill Simmons, now that he's there, and I've been listening to Bill Simmons for 10 years, I will, I will now listen on Spotify because that's where his content is. As long as he was cross-platform, I'm just gonna use Apple or whatever other podcast app I like. So what Spotify wants is, how do we bring— how we want new users, and we think having the number one sports podcast is like our way of eating into this whole podcasting market.
You get 300 $100 million worth of new— I think that when a—
so what you have to ask then, what is a listener to Spotify worth? So for example, if having podcasts on this, on Spotify, reduces churn by 1% or 2% for Spotify of people who cancel their membership because they're like, ah, you know what, like, I'm okay with the ads, or, you know, I don't use this that much. But now if that reduces churn by X percent, that could pay itself off right away. How much do I pay for Spotify?
I don't even know, like 10, 10-something bucks a month.
It's around 10, maybe it's 13 now, maybe it's 9. Damn. So LTV of a customer could be be fucking $1,000 easily, right? Because you're $120 a year. And, uh, and then same thing with like, you know, um, it's like the HBO model or whatever, Netflix. They're all trying to do the same thing, which is how do we get the key content here so that our subscribers stay subscribers or new people become subscribers? And that's the math. And so it has nothing to do with what The Ringer can do in its own revenue. That's irrelevant to them. It's what they think they can do if they— the key content in the key podcast verticals. So they're doing it in sports. I bet you they're also gonna do it in whatever podcast vertical number 2 is, self-help or whatever else it is. And they're gonna go cut deals with those personalities. Now, for most of those personalities—
So you're saying that this individual— this wasn't valued at revenue at all? No. Yeah, okay.
It's the Howard Stern goes to SiriusXM type of thing.
So then my takeaway from that is, is don't— if you're looking to start a company like this, don't do it. Expecting to get bought.
Yeah, right, you know, he— and he didn't, right? He's been doing this for years. Yeah, so don't expect to get bought, for sure. Gimlet, you know, for them too, I think this kind of like came out of nowhere where, you know, when they started the company, it wasn't obvious that this would happen. Uh, but all the tech companies, it's become content wars, whether it's video or audio, it's content wars. They all have a platform, they all have a subscription, and they all want to suck in all the exclusive content they can. And, uh, they have big budgets.
That said, I think that if you wanted to start this type of business, you could make a load— a load of revenue profit on your own without selling. Sure. I don't think that traditional media companies or people who come from that world like Simmons are creative enough to come up with ideas to knock it out the park. Yeah. But I think they could, right? Like, if there was like a Bill Simmons like championship event or something like that, like, for—
yeah, people would pay for things.
Yeah. Yeah, I think they would.
Yeah, that's cool. All right, cool. Do we want to do anything else?
No, I think we should— we're good to go. Wrap it up at 45 minutes. Okay, so we're gonna chop these up and put them out there, and we're gonna do this for tomorrow and the next day.
Yeah, we're gonna do a bunch of these and it's gonna be great. And we're gonna bring in guests from time to time as well to tell us about stuff that they're seeing in their space.
And we listen to feedback religiously. Sean texts me in DMs that he gets on a regular basis.
I just send screenshots.
Yeah, and I read— we both read all of them. So DM one of us.
Twitter is the easiest way to DM us. You can email me just puri.chan@gmail.com, or the Facebook group is like an easy way because we'll just see it.
I think Twitter's the best because other people can see it and comment. That's right. I retweet a lot of them, right? And I'll see. But so let us know. So this time we did it over 40 minutes. I think next time tomorrow, let's go over maybe one or two things. And we got to get to 100,000 listens. I think if we get to 100,000 listens per episode— I have no idea if this is true, I think it's true— that will be in the top 15.
Yeah, top 15. I would guess that's true.
All right, we're done.