Startup Ideas For Developers, Rebranding Elizabeth Holmes & Billy Of The Week

there's like dudes in prison for like 2 decades for selling like a little bit of weed. And, and she's just walking outta here with 2 ba— she, she basically took maternity leave from prison. Like, what's happening?

I don't understand.

Yeah. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off on the road.

Let's go.

All right. What up?

We're here, Sam. Incredible shirt.

Um, I mean, enough said.

Just one man to another, I'd like to issue a quick compliment and I'd like to move on.

Someone in the comments said, uh, oh wow, Seb's dressed like a grownup. All I was, all I was wearing was a, was a coat. And so I, I was wearing a jacket on top of his shirt, so I had to bring it back down. I I had to let people know, you know, I could play both sides here. Yeah. So Austin 316, baby.

Still got that dog in you, which I think is going to be the next shirt we make is the, uh, still got that dog in them. Um, okay. Where do you want to start? First of all, did you do anything crazy this weekend? Cause I feel like your weekends are a lot more interesting than mine.

This weekend I watched Cops on Sunday because that's what I do.

Solid session of Cops.

But then, so I'm, I did this combine thing. So like I wanted to, I set like a new fitness goal every quarter. And this year, this quarter, I wanted to score average for a wide receiver in the NFL Combine. And if you Google like NFL Combine averages, you can find them. And this Sunday I had to do my bench press test, which is 225 times or 225 pounds. And I had to do it about 15 times. Uh, and I just about hit 15. And so my results for my combine test, I almost scored average. I just missed it a little bit, but mostly I was there.

Wow.

Yeah. So I had, but, but the big discrepancy is when they do the combine, they use an electrical timer for the 40 and I did it by hand.

Yeah.

So my hand time was the same as the electric time. Typically electric is, is, is slower, meaning you have to add a little bit onto the hand time, but I kind of did it. I kind of did it.

This was one of my favorite business ideas that still, I don't, I'm not aware of anyone has done. It's not my favorite in that I don't, I don't think this is going to be the best business. I just, it's a product I wish existed, which is a traveling combine for your town. So basically the way I was thinking about it was for youth sports. So, you know, the market of like 33-year-old guys who really want to test themselves before they leave their athletic prime.

That's, that's you. And that's a small niche market.

So I'm taking this a step further. First of all, I knew I was going to marry my wife because when I met her father, he had the ideal calves. So he had the ball, he had the ball in the calf. Wait, what? You know how like—

I think I got a ball calf.

Well, usually people who are explosive, they have like a ball, like it looks like a little tennis ball in their calf. I saw, I saw his like skinny ankle with the ball in the calf and I was like, all right, so we can do something.

Skinny ankle has to go with it, right? That's a thing.

Oh yeah.

Pretty sure that's a thing. Skinny ankles.

You need a skinny ankle. You need a skinny— I remember I used to date a girl and she did not have a skinny ankle and I was like, I don't know if we could do this. I don't know if it's gonna work.

It's not you, it's me. Judging you.

Yeah, that's a great way to put it. And then I, um, I remember Malcolm Gladwell had a book and he says like, if you're born, uh, if you're the eldest in your class, you're more likely to be pro.

Yeah, you gotta be born in like September so that you miss the August cutoff. So you get a full year to go dominate those hoes.

And so I was like, we're thinking about where, you know, as I'm thinking about family planning, I'm like, where are we going to live? What's the school year cutoff? Can we, can we fit it in right before that? And then this weekend I got out a piece of paper and I'm like, basically my life plan is I don't want to, I want to rent until I buy a home that I want to live in forever. Because moving sucks. And like the house that I bought now, it was just like, oh, this is good enough. And then now I'm like, I don't want good enough. I want perfect. And so I'm just like plotting until, and so I'm thinking about what that right home is going to be. And I realized it has to have a 5,000 to 10,000 square foot like warehouse. So whichever sport they're in, we're going to build that. We're going to build that thing. So if it's hockey, gymnastics, doesn't matter what it is, we're building that there. And that kid is going to get awesome at that. And so I'm planning all that out now.

There's not a lot of houses with a 5,000 to 10,000 square foot warehouse attached to it. Just going to let you know, you may not have a huge selection.

I'm going to build it. I've already looked it up. I've already looked it up. I'm building this thing. Also, I have a theory that because my wife and I were from different, like very, very different ethnicity, uh, background.

Don't get canceled.

I think our kid, I, well, I think what I'm saying is I think if we, you mix all of these genes into one child, hopefully they're gonna be a super baby. You know, they won't get sick. They'll have strong calves. We'll see.

I don't know.

You know what's funny?

But when you say it like that, you know, it's strange, but, but acceptable socially. If you had just said the opposite, you're like, yo, me and wife, we have the same background. We're pure. Then all of a sudden you stepped out of bounds.

So, uh, no, I want, I want a diverse kid. They're going to be a super baby because my wife, uh, is, is mixed race. And I'm telling you, she doesn't get sick. There's like all these things about her that like, I like that. Like whenever she takes medicine, she never has the side effects. You know what I'm saying? Right. So I'm just saying she's a super baby. Uh, so we'll see what's going to happen with that. I will keep everyone updated though.

We are waiting eagerly.

I've got a few interesting topics. You want to talk about this Elizabeth Holmes thing first? Really, really quickly.

So funny. Explain, explain what, what you, what you saw. I don't have a New York Times subscription, by the way. So I only saw the headline and the photo. I assume you pay for the New York Times. Can you tell me what was in the story and explain this whole thing?

I will. So basically on Sunday, yesterday, today's Monday. She, uh, Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos, you know, uh, fraudster, whatever. She, the story of this is she was convicted of defrauding investors upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars, got sentenced to 12 years in prison. She pulled a wild move where she had a baby and then the baby, baby one is 2 or 3 years old. Baby two is now like 6 months old and she's making her plea to the government saying, actually, I have a newborn. You can't put me in prison. And they bought it and they did it. And so they delayed her prison sentence. I'm not sure how it's going to end up. New York Times did a big exposé on her.

Exposé or like positive feature. It seemed like a positive feature.

Does exposé mean negative? Because this was not negative.

This was incredibly positive. Exposed. It's like just like a guy with an accent saying exposed.

They exposed her as being a wonderful human is what they did. Uh, 'cause they make her sound like heavenly and I, well, read, read the headline. Liz Holm wants you to forget about Elizabeth. And the whole story is about how Elizabeth was this persona and how her new persona is Liz. And she's a normal mom. She speaks like a normal woman. You know, Elizabeth Holm was known as, she would talk like this and she would wear like a black turtleneck and whatever. And she, and then she admits, she's like, I did that because I was a woman. I'm blonde. I wanna be taken seriously. So I had a low voice. But listen to this, uh, and, and the pictures of her now, she's got long hair, she's wearing blue jeans and she looks like a mom. She looks like me, honestly, if I'm a woman and you go look at this picture, we look alike. Um, but listen to this one. She does. You see, I mean, she looks just like me.

Listen to this story. So here's an excerpt. I can't, uh, I can't shake us up. So Mr. Evans is her husband. I think Billy Evans. So in the waning days of Theranos, Ms. Holmes got a dog, a Siberian husky named Balto. Last year, when a mountain lion carried Balto away from the front porch, Ms. Holmes spent 16 hours searching the woods, digging through the brambles and poison oak, hoping to find him alive. Everyone knew that he was dead, but Ms. Holmes kept searching. She was relentless. The certainty, the fanaticism. It's the same way Ms. Holmes kept hanging on to Theranos. Ms. Holmes eventually found her beloved husky, Balto, in the woods, but by then the dog had been torn apart by a mountain lion. And it's this like whole story about how her seeking her dog is just her getting carried up in just the fanaticism. And she's really well-intentioned, but she just got caught up in it. It's like pretty, pretty wild. And I have to remind people, I wrote an article. I actually posted it on here. I wrote an article in 2016. So I want to call myself, I wrote this in 2015. And the headline of my article is the coverage of Theranos is utter bullshit. And the first sentence is Elizabeth Holmes has been thrusted into the spotlight as a scapegoat for all things wrong with Silicon Valley, but I find the media coverage around Theranos drama to be utter bullshit. And I explained why I think she didn't, she's not doing anything wrong and how she's being hated on. I left the article up because I'm like, you can't, you can't take down a mistake. You got to leave it up. But I, I fell for this. And when I read this article about New York Times, I just realized, I think I'm just a little, a little sissy. I fall for all this stuff. I read this and I'm like, oh, you're right. She's just like you and me. Like, let's, let's not send her to prison. I fall for all this stuff.

I mean, look at this. This is like, there's a picture of her and this guy and their two babies sitting on a bunch of rocks by the beach barefoot.

Do you see this?

I don't know if you see this photo.

Yes. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tweeted out. First of all, it looks, you're using Midjourney. What is this? Why does this look so fake? Secondly, like this whole, like you can't just get a new haircut and drop half your name. Like if I got a buzzcut and came on here and said, I'm Shah Puri, you can't be like, oh, that's Shah. Shah's a great dude. He doesn't care about money. Shah doesn't tweet controversial things. He's a different guy now. He's a dad. And then I take my kid to a place with some rocks and take a photo. That doesn't work.

Like, you know, it is working though. It is working though.

This is the greatest rebrand. Do you know who James Todd Smith III is?

No, who's that?

LL Cool J, baby. Oh my God, at least James Todd Smith had the decency to like fully change it up and try to get a whole new persona. This is crazy that she is, uh, that they're just trying to make this happen. I mean, I don't understand what's going on.

It's working though. She's not, she's not in jail. She was supposed to report to prison like 3 weeks, 3 weeks ago.

There's like dudes in prison for like 2 decades for selling like a little bit of weed and, uh, And she's just walking out of here with 2 billion. She basically took maternity leave from prison. Like, what's happening? I don't understand.

That's exactly what happened. That's exactly what happened. You know what? And you know, it's another thing that's kind of crazy is do you ever follow Ross Ulbricht on, or Ulbricht on Twitter? So Ross Ulbricht is the guy who killed, or he ran Silk Road. And Silk Road was like a drug marketplace. And at the time, in like 3 years, it did like $2 billion in sales. He also is accused of, did a murder for hire for 3 people or 4 people. None of the people died, but the police took pictures of the people pretending to be dead and sent it to Ross. And then he hired the fake killer, which was the police. He hired them again and again. And so anyway, he got life in prison and he tweets about it. I'm not one of those guys that thinks that he doesn't, he should go to prison. But dude, life is a long ass time for, for, that's a long time.

You know what I mean?

That's all the time. And he's tweeting in prison and I feel so sorry for these guys. I fall, I fall for all this stuff. I'm, you know, I'm just, I'm soft, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like it. Okay.

So this is, you think Ross is, you think Ross deserves life? I thought like 25 years is, is a nice, that's a nice time.

Well, isn't that actually what a life sentence is? Isn't a life sentence actually only like 22 years or something?

No, he got life without parole. Like he's, he's in there forever and he probably has multiple life sentences.

Right.

And it went all the way up to the Supreme Court. So they, so basically the only way I believe he's going to get out of prison is if a president says, what's it called where they put you out of prison? I forget the word, but that's like the only way that he's ever going to get out.

And I don't need to like get him confused. Pardon? My nephew Ross? No. Yeah.

A telemarketer needs to call. Yeah. A telemarketer needs to call Biden, pretend to be, uh, oh, we have your cousin. Yeah. Someone from India needs to act like they work at Apple or the IRS and call and figure out what's going on.

Your nephew Ross got into trouble. Can you help him?

Uh, yeah. I have a few more topics. What do you got? What do you got that's interesting?

So I want to tell you about a, a, uh, I have a, I have a feature here. I got a Billy of the Week for you. A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool?

A billion dollars.

It's been a little while since I have a good— had a good Billy of the Week. I kind of felt one bubbling up a little bit, and sure enough, I got one. Okay, so here's— I'm going to tell you some things about this person's career, and, uh, you can— you might know who it is, you may not. Okay, so this is somebody who's, um, so they've had a very successful business career. Sold a company to Berkshire Hathaway, actually. So they sold a company that had done $5 billion in a 10-year span of sales. Okay.

Wow.

Impressive.

They also— Do I have your interest now? Yeah, yeah, you do.

Yeah, I got one eyebrow up. All right, let me see if I get that other eyebrow up. They've won an Emmy. They were manager of Run-DMC and 50 Cent was their intern. At the time. Huh. So music dominated, business dominated.

How about— What's an Emmy?

An Emmy is the musical awards, I think. Emmy is actually TV. So this person, they wrote jingles for TV and stuff like that. And that's one way they made their bones, but they also managed Run-DMC, which was the hottest rap group in the world at the time. And 50 Cent was—

I think I know who you're talking about.

They also, you're a fit guy. I see a cut or two in the arms. The, uh, this guy's run over 50 marathons, has run 100 miles in 24 hours, and actually had David Goggins live with him for 30 days and ended up writing a book about it. Sounds pretty, pretty interesting. He's a part owner of an NBA team.

Does he have a successful wife?

That's the best part about it. In his marriage, he's not even the most successful one. Married who I, someone who I think is the youngest female billionaire. In the world. So incredible, incredible pull on his part. Let's see, do I have anything else good about him here?

Well, I think you missed something very interesting. The company that did $5 billion, $5 or $10 billion or whatever you said, billions in sales. Wasn't that a jet company?

It was a private jet company, fractional ownership of private jets. The person, oh, there's a few more. They also were a key partner in a CPG brand. Everybody wants to start a CPG brand, see it in store shelves one day. Did that. Zico Coconut Water. You ever heard of that one? Sold to Coca-Cola. Yeah. Got it everywhere.

This is somebody— I think they also wrote, I think they also wrote the jingle, the official jingle for the New York Knicks for some time.

That's right. Sure did. Sure did. In addition to that, Sells online courses. Hey, he's like one of us. He's just like us, these billionaires. I'm talking about, would you like to guess who I'm talking about here?

Say it. Jesse Itzler. So Jesse Itzler is the Billy of the Week. This guy's got a fascinating career, right? I am like, everybody's got a different thing they admire. The thing I admire the most in people is people who play the game their way on their, on their terms and their rules. And one of the ways you see that is people who have multiple chapters in their career where they're able to turn the page and do something completely different. So for somebody who started out in the kind of like jingle writing business to then be like a manager of a, of a, of a famous, you know, rap squad to then starting a private jet company to then living in a monastery with monks. To then becoming an endurance athlete, to then becoming an NBA owner, to then doing coconut water. Like, I love people who have done multiple chapters of their career. And I want to kind of talk about some of these different things he did. I can kind of run you through his timeline here of what he's done.

Yeah. And I, I, I read the book. It's called Living with SEAL. It was basically the book, I think, that got David Goggins to be famous. It was awesome. It was a good book.

Oh, was that before David Goggins kind of was like super well known?

Yeah, in the book I don't even think he mentions David's name and then it came out. Oh wow. It came out who this person was. I think he, Jesse was at a marathon and he saw this guy and David Goggins, you know, everyone knows he's like a 6'6" Black dude who's like ripped and that's not typically what an ultra marathon runner looks like. Right. And he became friends with him and hired him.

Was that a big business?

So they never really, they never fully released any numbers. The one thing he said is they did $5 billion in sales in a 10-year period. Which is a lot of sales.

I'm wondering. I'm not sure if, I'm not sure of the economics of that though, because it's like, if you sell, they didn't sell jets, but if you sold jets, like that doesn't necessarily, like a jet costs $20 million, you actually only make $500K from it. I don't, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. I don't actually know if it's legit.

Yeah, they have a house in Atlanta and they're, I follow him on Instagram. He's always in, I think he owns a fat townhouse in New York.

He's also RVing. I've seen them like RV, like in this huge tour bus looking RV thing.

Dude, he, I, I'm all, I also think he has like 6 kids too. The guy does it all.

Yeah, I know. Quadruple threat, dare I say? So he, uh, so he also started this thing called 29029 Everlasting, Everesting. And so what it is, is basically they rent a mountain and they bring together like food, music, and it's a, it's an endurance event where you can walk, run, climb, crawl, whatever you want to do up this mountain. And then you take the gondola back down until, and you keep going up and down, up and down until you've done 29,029 feet, which is the height of Mount Everest. So it's like a way to hike Everest without going to Everest and without doing the extreme risk. Of, uh, of, of surviving Everest. He's got like his All Day Running Club. You probably know about this one. It's a paid membership club for, for runners, basically $400 for the, for the year. And, uh, he's wrote 2 books. He was a rapper back in the day, back in 1991. He was a rapper called Jesse James and, uh, wrote the jingle, the, the New York Knicks theme song, Go, Go NY Go. And, uh, I mean, just done it all. Really, really incredible. Variety in his career.

I think this is—

prolific. Prolific.

That's a good word. Prolific. The guy's prolific. Was he— and then his wife is Sara Blakely, who sold Spanx, I think it was. Yeah. And Spanx was just acquired for like $2 or $3 billion or something like that. Do you know what the final— it was just bought by Blackstone, BlackRock or Blackstone, whichever one is the one that buys companies, bought it.

Yep.

And If I remember correctly, that company was entirely bootstrapped.

1.2 billion.

1.2 billion. I think she owned most of it. Yeah. So like, they're killing it. Imagine being Jesse and not the most successful one financially in the relationship. That's a good catch.

Yeah. What's like the best thing? I wanted to make a joke there about like, you know, in the house he does the dishes or something like that. What's like the, uh, What would have been the joke there for him being like the subordinate in the house?

I think he manages the people who do the dishes at this point, but he's definitely managing people. No, I've been following them for a while. Jesse's been, he kind of like became the self-help guru and I was turned off by him. And then I actually started following him more and I was like, oh no, you're actually pretty awesome. And he's the one he's made. So he's been on the forefront of a lot of really popular health trends. So he was really into saunaing for a long time. And now like hot and cold exposure is, is quite popular. He's been doing that for years. He's also been doing fasting. I would follow him like years ago and he would go like 5 days without eating and he would try all these weird health things. And now a lot of these things are popular. He was, he's been doing it for a while. And in his book, it's called Living with SEAL. He basically found David Goggins. David Goggins lived with him for 30 days. It's an awesome book. It's a really good book. And then he tells all these crazy stories about this guy. And so I'm a big fan of Jesse. Now, once I got to know him, I was turned off when I like first heard about him. And then I realized he's pretty badass.

Funny you say that. I had the same, same reaction. I saw him just in a bunch of like public speaking slash like ads being like, you gotta take my course and do whatever. And I was like, you know, usually typically people who are like pretty self-promotional with that sort of stuff. It's like their main business is actually the talking, like their main business is the selling you on how to be successful, not like having been successful themselves. That's just like a general rule of thumb. So I was really surprised when I looked into it. I was like, oh wait, actually this guy's like pretty prolific. He's pretty legit. I'm surprised I had that opinion of him though. I kind of bucketed him mentally as like online business guru guy. You know, but maybe, I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe that was a total mischaracterization now that I see kind of all the stuff he's done. I also think one really interesting thing is, uh, have you heard about his pickles thing?

No.

What's that? So, by the way, I invited him on the podcast. We follow each other on Twitter. So I DM'd him last night and I was like, hey, you should come on. I want to hear, I want to hear about some of the stories that the experiments that didn't work out because this is all the wins. I'm, I'm sure if you're a guy who's tried this many different things, you had to have a bunch of, uh, A bunch of, you know, trial and error along the way. So he posted this on Instagram last month. He goes, why I'm excited about pickles, all caps. And he goes, last week I said I wanted to buy or partner with a pickle company and boxes of pickles have been showing up at my house all week. It's exciting. I'm doing a live taste test this week. They're all so different. Lots of people asking me why pickles. Here's why. He goes, first of all, can you name 5 pickle companies? I hate pickles. I don't know. Can you name any pickle companies?

There's probably only 2 or 3 that I like to buy. I buy a lot of pickles. I'm a big pickle guy.

We just need the perfect pickle. Is that like a Yiddish thing?

I have no idea.

Well, pickles are like popular amongst Jewish people. He's Jewish. Is Hoya, is that like a, maybe it's like a Yiddish name.

I don't know. It's a funny name. And he says, it says, if you go to their bio, they only have 2,000 followers right now, but I'm going to follow this. I want to hear this story play out. He goes, we're crowdsourcing our brand while we create the best pickle company, while we find the best pickle company to partner with. DM if you have a clean ingredient pickle company. And then he's basically like, uh, like he's got a feed and it's like, here's a picture of Adam Sandler casually eating a jar of pickles. It's like, he's just trying to build this pickle company. He's trying to do the coconut water thing again for pickles this time.

And, uh, I find this, this really interesting. I think you could probably pull it off. Dude, pickles are awesome. I like Jesse. We should get him on. If Jesse, if this makes it to you, this will make it to you anytime.

Yeah. And remember when you, I went to HustleCon, your conference, and there was the guy who created Method Soap and he created Ollie Vitamins. He created Welly Band-Aids. He created 3 hit consumer, you know, CPG goods that were sitting in Target.

Ryan something.

Eric Ryan, I think is his name. It's him and his brother. Eric Ryan.

Yeah. And he's like a flamboyant looking guy. He wears like these bright glasses and he His hair is combed exotically. I like that guy.

Well, Jesse, if you're listening, come on, man. Come on on. Come on the thing. I got like a, we were at, I was one time I was doing one of these events and we were looking at speakers and we typically had never paid speakers. And for some reason his name popped up and like his agent sent or some agent sent like how much his fee is. And it was like $100,000 to get him to come and talk. So the guy's killing it in a variety of places. That's right. All right. I have another interesting person and I'm going to explain why I found this person. Have you ever heard the phrase, the way you do one thing is the way you do everything?

Hate that phrase.

Why do you hate that phrase?

Because I do a bunch of things terribly and then I'm like, does that mean I'm going to do everything terribly? So I hate it because if it's true, I'm in trouble.

I'm so glad you said that last part, because I've done this so many times. I've just Michael Scotted it. So many times where I will read something or hear something or have some kind of crazy idea, but usually it's, I hear, I heard some cool person did some cool thing and then I'll try it in our office and I just got these looks like, okay. And then within 4 days the thing is gone and I'm like, oh man, I really needed a different like force of will. Charisma or some, like a leather jacket. I needed something. I'm missing something to make this thing.

Because the way you do one thing is the way you do everything, man. You didn't do a good enough job. Neither did I. And once I failed at that, I realized I need to do this stuff even more. And so with Hampton, with Hampton, I'm trying to figure out what is that thing, you know, that we can all do. And I realized right now it's our Zoom setups. So I actually, I linked it down here in our document, but I have this, I have this. So if you go to scroll all the way down to where it says Zoom, I have this document called How to Look Good on Camera. And the reason I do that is because when people apply to Hampton, we interview everyone and then me or Joe or someone else goes and watches the interview to see if that person should be approved. And I saw one of our guys, his name's Alex Pattis. He works at Hampton and he's awesome. But I saw that his camera setup was horrible. I was like, dude, this looks like a ransom video you filmed on a Nokia camera. Like, this looks really bad. And so we're going to have to like, we're going to have to like fix this. You know, first impressions matter. And so I created this guide on how to make your Zoom camera look good. And then we gave everyone a budget to go and buy like the proper lighting and things like that. And that's like my one thing that I'm trying to implement now, where it's like, I won't talk to you unless your Zoom camera looks great. It has to look good. And it doesn't have to look like professional, like you and me, like a DSLR camera, but it's got to look pretty good and you can make it look pretty good with like $500. And so we're making everyone have their Zoom camera look great.

So first of all, this doc is hilarious and the video of the picture of the guy who looks like the ransom guy is hilarious. Um, I think you're close, but I don't think you quite got it. I hate to, I hate to do that to you as a friend to just pop the bubble like that, but I think you got half of it right. Meaning I think you, your solution is great. But you picked the wrong area. Meaning this is too logical. It's too quantifiable. Why they, why this is a good idea. You said, well, first impressions matter. Everybody agrees with that. And you'd say, well, you're doing sales essentially for the company, so you need to like show up the right way. It's almost like you could calculate the ROI. The beauty of the polish the chairs and your leg chairs or whatever is that it's unnecessary. Same thing with the make your bed in the morning first thing, or wake up at 4:30 in the morning just to harden yourself as a person or take a cold shower is it's gotta have some, it's gotta be something you kind of don't want to do or seems unnecessary to do. And it's like, but that's the point.

So what's an example?

This is almost like you kind of gotta do it. This is almost like, uh, yeah, it makes sense. I agree. I'm not taking a leap of faith here. I'm just doing what, you know, maybe I was held back by money or the tech setup and I just didn't get around to it. Um, so I think it's good, but I think you need something that's a little bit more story-worthy, which is like, yeah, at Hampton we made everybody blank. And I think if you say we made everybody fix their camera setup, it's not going to have that same showmanship. It's not going to have the same, uh, punchiness as if it's something that was completely unnecessary to do.

So I've got to figure out what that thing is though, but I, but I desperately want it. I want, I want a shtick. Oh yeah, I love a good shtick.

You need a stick. I love a good shtick. I'm a big fan of shticks.

I think they add a lot. Right now, my current shtick is your, your Zoom camera has to look good. It's gotta look great.

You get a, everybody has to get a small tattoo on their ankle of a date 5 years in the future, which is when Hampton will be worth $1 billion, right? You have to go, you have to go pledge, baby. You gotta go get, get branded if you're gonna get outta this.

But I love that stuff. And that's another thing we're thinking about Hampton is we're like, what rituals do like our members need to have in order to get them bought in? And so I'm like trying to like research like fraternities and sororities, but I love this stuff in the same way that Tony Robbins, his shtick is that, uh, what's it called? A firewalk?

Yeah. Walk on coal.

Which like isn't even that big of a deal, is it? Have you walked on coal?

Yeah, I did it. I've done it twice at his events.

Um, yeah, it's like a pretty sanitary thing, isn't it?

Yeah, it's right. There's no, there's no, no risk in doing this. Basically he's like, yeah, you got to get your mindset right. You got to get in the state. And when you're in state, you could do anything. It's like, I'm pretty sure that like they basically just make you stand on this thing that's wet before. So you get like moisture on the bottom of your foot and then you could just walk across these coals and it's not gonna like, unless you stood there and stayed there, it won't make it past that layer of water or whatever. There's some like, it's just actually science that if you're, if you walk across this much thing for this much time with this much water on your foot, you're not going to get in. You're not going to have any problems.

I've gone down this road before and I studied a bunch of different like kind of rituals. Basically anybody that has a really strong community, what, what is it? Everything from actual cults, uh, European soccer clubs where the fans are just insane. Um, like I went to Duke and we used to live in a tent for 3 months, which is basically living in a line to try to get into the big game. Really? And everybody behaves, everybody behaves a certain way. People don't even like basketball are living in a tent for 3 months just to do this, just because they get swept up in the rituals, the movement. I remember I'd never been to Burning Man, but I talked to people. I was like, dude, there's something about Burning Man that gets people to act totally differently than their normal behavior. What is it? And they told me that when you enter Burning Man, I might butcher this because again, I've never been, but when you get to Burning Man, so you first, you wait in line and in your car basically for hours, hours and hours trying to just get to the entrance. And when you get to the entrance, Apparently you kind of like, you get out and they give you a name. They give you like your new name, your burner name. And then you like roll around in the sand or some shit like that. Have you heard this?

Yeah, like Firefox Lion Boy.

Yeah, and then you roll in the sand and then that's like your fucking like entrance thing or whatever. Yeah. I did something at my last company that was kind of like that, which was just roll around the streets of Soma. No, I'm just joking. Yeah. We had a meeting once. I was, everybody had been at the company for like a year.

The, what's it like, the hepatitis huddle. Everyone's gotta go out in the streets of SoMa and roll around.

It's syringe Sunday, baby. Get on the ground. Yeah.

Go pick one up.

We're cleaning these streets up with our body. The, but I did this thing where after 6 months of working, I called a team meeting and I basically gave a presentation to the team. About each one of them. And I basically said, this is, this, this is Sam. This is Sam's story. And this is Sam's superpower. And I gave everybody a superpower. And I was like, this is, um, this is Derek. Derek was our designer. I said, designers are notoriously, they're just artists. They're fickle. They need inspiration. They, you give them a deadline. Artists are terrible with deadlines. And, uh, but Derek's superpower. Is that Derek is the mailman. He delivers every day of the week except on Sundays. And I was like, Derek, if you give him something at 9 AM, he will have it to you by 5 PM every single day without fail, except Sundays. You message Derek, he's not going to get back to you.

And I was like, which is like, it's totally not true, but you've just implanted that into him.

Just, you ask for him, he's got you. He's always got some change on him.

Always, always good for 20. He, I was like, he melts bullshit. And I was like, he is just a bullshit melter. You can't bring bullshit around him. It's like radioactive. It'll just start to melt. Right away. And so he otherwise, Furkan was pretty like, uh, direct. And I think some people, you know, were intimidated by him and they felt like he was like, you know, criticizing them when he would say something, but then they reframed it as he's just using the super, he's just, he just, he's great at identifying and melting bullshit. It's not you. It's, it's the shit that he's melting. And so, um, so I tried to do that for everybody. And I really felt that was one of the few like management random like random experiment schticks that actually worked, that people really like, they liked that they had a superpower. And then they kind of, I named it and then I reinforced it and people, uh, people started using that one actually in the office. Whereas most things was just me trying to make fetch happen and they're like, it's not going to happen.

Well, I remember early in my career, like I worked the only job I ever had. This guy had a schtick and he would try to, he would get everyone to clap like Slow clap before I do it.

Yeah. Yeah.

It was like that. And I remember thinking like, this is so stupid. And then after a couple of weeks, I was like, all right, cool. Love the old slow clap. Now I'm a little, yeah, now I'm a little bit older and I'm like, uh, shtick is good. A good shtick is great. Like it's really good. A lot of that like performative stuff. I used to think I'm, I'm too cool for this. I don't need this. And then you realize like, no, man, humans are not logical. We need emotion. Like this emotional stuff matters. Like the difference between a highly motivated person and who's using their emotions effectively is significantly better than someone. I mean, that's like, if you look at like different wars, like you could like look at like who is like fired up the right way versus who's not. And it really has a massive difference.

Are you reading this? Are you reading this off something?

No, that's just straight off the dome.

That's a good little, that's a good little, a good little thing. Next tweet. There you go. That's a great one, actually.

If I wasn't a retired Twitter artist, I would have tweeted that one. I got one other quick one for you.

I want to read you—

Justin?

Yeah. Yeah. I've been eager to see what you're going to say.

I want to read you something. So this was—

You're on that Justin Mares tip. So we talked about Justin Mares at the last pod. Justin's a very fantastic entrepreneur. You've clearly been reading his blog. You've been obsessing.

I actually, somebody sent this to me afterwards. So I haven't, I have only read this screenshot that they sent. Somebody sent this to Ben. They go, I feel like you did every time you've done this.

Last time you read, you said you were reading a book and I was asking about the book and you're like, I've actually, uh, you go, I just read this awesome book and turns out you were 5 pages in.

Yeah. It's awesome. You love at first sight, you know, when you know.

All right.

This reminds me of something I've seen a bunch and I have a sensitivity towards it because I did this, which is, um, a lot of people want to do like startup studio, idea lab. I want to do multiple things at once, basically. So they want to do parallel entrepreneurship. I ran an idea lab for 5, 6 years or so, and I loved it. Because it's the most fun thing you could possibly do. It's like you get— I had a blank check and an awesome team, and I could pursue not just any idea, many ideas at the same time. And I could go from meeting to meeting to meeting and have all this amazing variety of adventures and challenges and ups and downs. And it was like I felt like I got 20 years of experience in 4. But notice that I said experience instead of Success, because it was a lot of lessons learned and a lot of skill sharpening. It wasn't a lot of winning.

And if you would have had to have stick to one idea, do you think that would have been better? Or if you would have had a smaller budget?

Which idea do you think would have been the one that you should have stuck with at Monkey Inferno?

I think for the most part, it was ideas that we weren't— what we should have done. So what we did do versus what we should have done. What we did do was we tried to create hit social apps. Why? Because before that, the main— the guy who was running it, who hired me, and the guy who became the main investor, investor, or was the main investor. They had built a social network called Bebo. They had competed with Facebook and MySpace back in the heyday of social networks. They sold it for $850 million. Facebook went on to become worth $850 billion. And there was always this sort of like, shoulda, woulda, coulda. And at the time, people were pretty down on Facebook. It felt like there was going to be something new, but nobody knew what it was. And sure enough, turned out to be, you know, Instagram, then Snapchat, then TikTok eventually. And so New things did come out. That part was right. But the wrong part was trying to recreate, rechase that dream because it was just so low chances of success. So we built messaging apps and social networking apps and all this stuff. And it just was really, really hard to get it to work. What we should have done was we should have built either tools for startups or tools for developers because we knew what the pain points of an early stage startup were. And we had a bunch of developers. We had like 18 developers. And so it was like, we could have built products that were—

What was the total budget? What was your budget for the, do you know, like $3 million, $4 million?

I think we burned about $3 to $4 million a year in funding.

Which isn't that much money for 20 people.

Well, we also had, it wasn't fully 20, 20 was like where it got to at the peak, but also I would say the core team was like, let's say 15 people. So 15 people, I think you can do the math. Maybe I have it a little wrong there. There was, I don't know if that was pre-taking into account the profits from one of our businesses. So We also revamped one of his early businesses that was his cash cow, Birthday Alarm. And Birthday Alarm was making millions of dollars of profits before. It had been declining year over year for 5 years straight. We kind of like revamped it, tried to turn it around and got it back to, you know, slightly growing basically at that by the time I left. And so, um, that covered a portion of the burn. So I don't know if the $3 or $4 million was pre that or post that. I don't remember at this point, it's been 6 or 7 years. Since I was doing that.

Which was there, uh, was there a developer tool idea that you thought you should do, but you didn't and someone else came and took the opportunity?

So I'll tell you 3 ideas that I think would have worked that we had, that we literally discussed and had the idea for. Um, the first was, uh, user testing. So I used a very early prototype version of user testing and I was like, hey, this is a pain point for a startup. Like, like the, the company, the company user testing, which is basically like I could pay $100 and I could get 4 people to go try our app, talk through it. They would find bugs, they would tell us if they liked it or if they didn't like it, they would tell us what's confusing about it. And I was like, these videos are amazing. Like, this is saving me so much time versus having to go in the wild and find, literally find people, stand over their shoulder and watch them do this or just guess. And I was like, this is a super useful service. And I told Michael that one day, I was like, hey, I think we should build this. For startups. And I think we could outpace them in terms of marketing because we're here in Silicon Valley. We understand the startup game. Like we're, we would be good at getting early stage companies to use this.

And usertesting.com is like a multi-hundred million dollar a year business now.

But I'm not going to jail.

But I'm not trying to go to jail and I'm not trying to do like money. I'm not trying to handle like money in serious like ways like this. I think like Bitcoin, isn't this like snake oil? I don't know. And I like kind of, I convinced him enough that day to buy Bitcoin, I think. Like he was basically like, I don't know, sounds a little sketchy. He like bought some as a hedge, but he was like, I don't think we should do, I don't think we should be in the Bitcoin business. 'Cause you need a, you need licenses to do this. You're basically just talking about building a bank. It's a super gray area. I'm not trying to lose my billion dollars. Like I can lose the $3 million. I can't lose my billion. And it was like, dude, the message I got, cock block Michael Birch.

He just blocked you guys hard.

I don't mean to blame him. The mistakes were all on me. I'm just I recall two examples where I think we had good ideas that we didn't see through. The third was we had built Blab into a business that was like a really good video chat product. And, um, it was, it had got to 4 million users. So it was like kind of a thing. So it was basically like, if you see Clubhouse today or like, uh, Zoom today, it was like basically like a Zoom call or Google Hangout, 4 people could be on the screen talking., but there was like a live audience and anybody could kind of request to join and jump in from the audience and start talking. So you could do like call-in shows and shit like that. Uh, and it got pretty popular. Like Tony Robbins was using it. Like famous bands were using it. The UFC was using it.

Martin Shkreli.

Martin Shkreli was using it. Yeah, exactly. Um, and so we had, we got to 4 million users, but it was like, so we thought maybe this is that thing, that big social product we've been waiting for. But it was pretty clear to me that it was too leaky. Churn was high. Yeah, churn was going to be too high. People weren't going to use this every day. Or the people who did use it every day, they were there just to make friends. So therefore it wouldn't grow because they didn't bring friends. They were there to make friends. And so you have this problem where if your sticky users are people who are there to meet people, they're not going to bring people. And so you're either not going to grow and you're going to have stickiness or you're going to grow and you're not going to have stickiness was the problem we ran into, which is why, by the way, when I wrote that thread that went viral calling, explaining why Clubhouse was not going to work. Back when Clubhouse was at its peak. The reason I knew that was because we had built a very similar product and run into all those same issues. And sure enough, it's all playing out now.

Hey, so you didn't get rich, but at least you got kind of popular on Twitter. Yeah. So there's that.

What's the— it's like I just dropped $400 at Chuck E. Cheese and I got this like, you know, little, little slinky laser pointer. Yeah. I got a laser pointer that'll sign to me. Yeah.

So that's cute. You have your, you have your little Twitter thing. That's nice.

Exactly. So, so that was the, the thing there. The move there would've been to shift towards like Citrix was the big, Citrix had a thing called WebEx, which was like their like, uh, video chat, like for meetings and presentations and conferences and webinars. And the obvious thing was we had built a way better tool for webinars or, or like kind of large company chats, like, uh, all hands meetings and things like that. If we had pivoted to B2B basically, we genuinely had a, like, sort of like, you know, 5x better product than them at the time. And I think we could have made it successful. We even had the idea. We were like, should we do this? We're like, ah, kind of got to do sales and shit. I don't know. Like, do we want to do that? Are we, are we a B2B company now? And it was like, nah, we'll just try again to build the next big social app, which was, you know, a giant mistake.

Hey, you're not flying private and you don't have a vacation home in Tahoe, but at least you learned. At least you learned. You know, if you're not winning, you're learning.

That'll be, that'll be the title of my book. It's a memoir called At Least I Learned.

Dude, I hate when people say winning or learning. I'd rather win. I don't want to learn. I'd rather be a dumb winner than a smart loser. All day of the week. That's easy. I'd rather be waiting on my plane, but barely know how to read. This is why I love this pod. You get stories like that. Those are good stories.

Yeah, I think we should wrap it up there. But tell me what's that say on your shirt?

Austin 3:16, baby.

It tells us all what it says on that shirt.

We gotta start getting back into that stuff. I've been out of the game, but Anyway, good pod. That's the episode.

Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

Uh, I put my all in it like no days off on the road.

Let's travel. Never looking back.