Wait, My Intern Became a 21-Year-Old Millionaire??

I remember at one point you're telling me in Slack, you're like, these people just offered me $2 million for this. I'm like, holy shit, you did it. We started the podcast, My First Million. You just made your first $2 million. Congrats. Like, I can't believe this worked out. You're like, I'm not going to sell though. And I was like, wow, this guy's insane. And I was like, that's an insane story. 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.

All right.

So I can't tell you how many times I hear this.

People will DM me every single day and they'll say, hey, I'm just calling my shot right now. Today I'm just— I'm a small boy. In 3 years from now, I'm going to be on MFM. I'm going to be on My First Million. I'm going to make my first million doing XYZ. Yeah, every single day I get a message like that. Here's somebody who actually did it. This is Ishan. He was my intern turned guy who's made millions and millions of dollars, lost millions of dollars, and had a crazy journey in between. You were the guy who I created this podcast with.

Yeah.

You were the guy who— the COVID art of our podcast, he created it. The intro song originally, the original intro song, he created it. You know, I didn't even know how to record audio at the time. This guy did all of it. You went from behind the scenes to now you're on the stage here in my house and we're going to record this episode.

So I've made it.

You've made it.

That's the teaser.

All right, let's tell the story. All right.

What's up, man? Yeah, what's up?

I, uh, so people don't know this. So you are Ishan. You, uh, I've met— I've known you since you were 18 years old. You still are kind of like 18 years old.

Oh yeah, yeah, I still look like—

yeah, you're 23 now.

Yeah.

All right, so I'm thinking this episode is kind of like— your title wasn't intern, but it's gonna be good for YouTube. So we're gonna be like, intern— my intern became a millionaire.

Okay, well, yeah, I was like glorified, and like my type of official title is Chief of Stuff. I'm just like kind of like— and by the way, I got a good track record with this.

I don't know if I'm doing anything, but I'm good at picking people because I worked with you at age 18.

Yeah.

Steve Bartlett, 19, maybe 20 years old. There's a guy, another guy named Sean, who just tweeted out today that he's like, those 4 months I worked with you were super influential. He went from like guy just working someplace. Now he's got an 8-figure agency.

So that was cool. Yeah.

Danny Miranda worked with me for a little bit. People know him in the podcast game now. He was with us for a couple of months before he started creating content.

So I feel like those two ishans and maybe getting people that like sound similar to your name. Yeah, yeah.

The closer the better, actually.

All right.

So you've had a crazy run, but let's do, let's do the history. So how did we meet?

Well, I followed you on Twitter when I was like 12, 13 years old. I was tweeting. My whole strategy was let me get my like like profile picture.

Before we do that, I'm going to re-intro the one part, which is one thing that people don't know is this podcast was started actually not with me and Sam, me and you. I hit you up on Twitter DMs.

Yes.

Yeah. And I saw that you were doing a, you were a podcast editor for somebody else I knew. Um, I think Corey or Angel List or something like that.

Yeah.

Corey Levy. And so I had this idea. All right. I want to do a podcast. I hit you up. I didn't know how old you were, but I was like, hey, do you want to— you want to produce for me? Then we got on a call. I was like, oh man, this is like a kid somewhere. You were at school at the time. And I was like, will you— do you know how audio works? And you're like, yes, I got you. So if people see the COVID art of the podcast, you made that. The initial, like, you know, 20 episodes or whatever, all those intros and all the audio, you made that. Yeah. Then we started doing business experiments together. This was at a time where I was kind of like, I think I want to build an audience. Yeah. And I also want to just launch some businesses. We launched e-com businesses, we launched a bunch of shit together, and then we all went off our own ways. And then you had a crazy journey after that where you made millions of dollars, lost millions of dollars and all the rest. So we're going to talk about all that. Let's start at the beginning. So I DM'd you, but you were actually— were on Twitter where you said we were, what, 13 years old?

13 years old. I followed you. I was trying to just get my face like on all these people and because I'm from Australia, right? There's no, there's no Silicon Valley. There's no like VCs and cool angels and all these people. So I was like, let me, this is my avenue to get to these people. And then let me just like, even if it wasn't like a lot of value add, let me just tweet random shit at you guys. And I was doing that. So if you just go on my Twitter, you'll find tweets of me, you know, tweeting off to Sean random shit and you'll respond here and there. But yes, that was like when I was, yeah, literally like 13, 14, whatever. And then a couple of years later, when I was with the podcast with Corey, is when you DM'd me and I was like, yeah, I already know who you are and let's do this. I think your name was, I think I found you because your name was also Sean and I was like, this is like, this is, this is it to me. But yeah.

So you talk about the start. So when we were working together, tell me some of the things you remember. Cause I remember, I only wrote, everyone's got their own version of history.

Yeah.

I remember in my head, like, you know, what we were thinking back then, but I'm curious. And this is our first time catching up in person because you live in Australia and you're just in town.

And you used to live where I lived. I was living in Brisbane. You also, like, way back when, lived in Brisbane. Yeah.

So what's your version of history? What do you remember?

The first thing I remember— well, I think the first thing I remember is when we were doing the podcast, like, cover art and stuff, I sent you over some, like, you know, like, here's version A, version B, blah, blah, blah. And then you were like, hold on a second, you should add your name. To the COVID art.

Yeah.

And I thought that was really cool. That gave me a lot of confidence. Like, okay, yeah, this is— I'm like, I'm a part of this as well. I remember that was a cool thing you did because I think maybe there's some learning there with people that hire— Yeah, give them something special.

Make them feel special.

Yeah, yeah. You make it feel special. Do that. So that was also a really cool thing I remember. Also, I'm just like the kind of craziness of like, let's start a crystal store today and then like a few weeks later, let's start this other D2C thing. Make up, make the store, 72 hours, go off and do it. It was like, it was like some variation of like an incubator, but it's just like, at this time I'm working at Twitch.

I'm earning out my deal. We sold to Twitch. I'm now earning out and I know, okay, in a year I get this vesting check. But in the meantime, like, frankly, I was pretty bored inside of a big company. I, you know, it's not, I knew that's not my long-term. And I was like, you know, on the side here, what can I do to entertain myself? The podcast was one. Cool thing I'd always wanted to do. And then the other would be like, I would meet somebody and I'm like, oh, this person's killing it in e-com.

Yeah.

Yo, Ishan, I'm making an e-com store. And I remember for the crystals thing, I was like, I read some article, I saw some magazine. Like, I always try to look outside of— like, I don't look at TechCrunch to get tech ideas or like business ideas. I look at some release. I remember reading like a People magazine and it was like Adele was saying she won't go on stage unless she has her, like, rose quartz crystal. And I was like, what? Like, that's insane. Like, you— who believes in this crap? And I Googled it and I was like, after Kim Kardashian got mugged, she had like a $4 million ring. She got mugged and it was like, how did you recover? She's like, well, my crystals really grounded me. And I was like— and then you see all these celebrities. I'm like, if— again, I just think people are sort of like— I have this tweet that's like, the economy is just smart people paying beautiful people to market to, to sort of like average people. And I was like, if all the celebrities are doing this, then there's got to be a bunch of other people that believe in this. And so I remember calling you and you were like, the best part about you was your game. That's my favorite thing is like, if you hire somebody with no experience, there's a bunch of bad things. Like, I'd be like, dude, like, I haven't heard from you in 2 days. Where'd you go? Yeah, but then on the good side, it'd be like, he doesn't know any better. So I could just be like, hey, we're doing this and it's gonna be, we're gonna launch it in 2 days. And you're probably just like, I don't know, is that normal? Maybe that's normal, right? Like, yeah.

Because besides this, like, I'd never, I've always been working for like internet people. I have never had like a traditional go to an office and, right. And like I was, I remember at the time I was like, uh, I'm like, I'm going to finish uni. Should I go and be a consultant for like some bank or whatever?

Yeah.

You asked me that. I was like, so I, cause yeah, I just didn't know what the other I guess I was just scared because I didn't know what the other world was like. I was like, all right, this is kind of normal and doing this. So, um, so yeah, crazy stuff like just, yeah, creating different e-com stores or different experiments. We did like a newsletter, the good, terrible, bad, very bad.

Oh, and then dude, I don't even know that one. Top 5 of Milk Road, right? Milk Road became a successful newsletter company, but I guess before that, I don't even remember that. We did launch a newsletter. Called the No Good, Very Bad, Terrible Something Something Something newsletter. Yeah, I don't know why we called it that, but we basically were launching a bunch of experiments. And I remember at the time, one, one of my takeaways from that is that Crystal Store, for example, I didn't even know what winning looked like. So one problem with an experiment is easy to use this word experiment, but the way a science experiment works, you have a hypothesis. You're like, I believe this. Then you run the test and either confirms it or doesn't. Yeah, but I was using the word experiment wrong, which was like, I'm just going to try a bunch of shit without actually knowing, like, what is the win condition? Yeah, what is the success or failure condition of this? And so like, now that I look— now that I actually have an e-commerce, like, our e-commerce business now, you know, is doing very well. It's an 8-figure e-commerce business. Now that I know what an e-com business looks like, I can go back and think about our, our Crispr store actually was doing very well. Like, I just didn't know. So for example, we were running Facebook ads and the key metric for all e-commerce businesses is your ROAS, your return on ad spend. And I think we were getting like 1.7.

Yeah. Well, like the rocks.

Yeah.

We were selling these rocks for like 50, 60.

They're called rocks. They're crystals.

Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, I remember like the first few hours we got that Shopify ding.

Yeah. It's like amazing.

Like that was, I mean, most people start up a store and they don't have sales for like a couple of days or whatever or weeks. And so yeah, it, I think our problem was like, just didn't continue.

We didn't continue. Exactly. 'Cause I was, now that I look back, it was like 1.7 to 2x. Yeah. And I remember thinking, oh, it's supposed to be 3 or 4x, I think. 'Cause I had heard some idiot saying that somewhere and I just thought that's what it is. And so I was like, oh, I guess this is bad. Turn it, like shut it down.

Let's do the next thing.

You know, in retrospect, it's, I, you know, maybe I'm glad I'm not running a crystal store, but at the same time, like there is a lesson there of, I mean, sticking to it is obviously a crit— like, you can't win without the stick-to-it-ness. But one of the things that makes you stick to it is not just willpower. It's like knowing your win condition. So like, you— do you even know what to look at? And do you know what winning looks like? Do you know what the benchmark should be so that you can actually assess a successful versus unsuccessful experiment? That was one of my learning— one of my things I remember from back then. The other one I remember is like with the pod, we kind of like, we called our shot a little bit. Like we made this Google Doc. Yeah. Of the plan, the one-page plan. And now I call that my kickoff doc, but it was like before we started it, I wrote this out. Do you remember that?

That doc? Yeah, I remember. And it was, well, the first thing that you hopped on was like, you need your 1,000 true fans. Like that was the very, very first thing that you're like, if we just got this, you can build a pretty big business just with with 1,000 people. That was like the first thing I remember. And then you had a few things like we need to get to 100,000 listeners and get a bunch of other, like maybe build a business of, or like, you know, these ancillary businesses, adjacent businesses across it. And I mean, you did all that. I was like, that's, that was one thing. You kind of step back and it's like, I'll share the doc.

I'll put the doc, if you're on YouTube, I'm going to put it on the screen so you can see literally like word for word what we wrote back then. And it's not that it, it wasn't all right in that it all happened, but it definitely didn't happen on the timeline. I remember thinking, we're going to hit, let's get to 100,000 downloads per episode. So that's the thing, like per episode, I want 100,000 downloads by the end of the year. So it was like 12 months.

Yeah.

Took me 3 years. So like, you know, now we do that, but like, you know, it took 3 years for us to ever hit that mark. So it's kind of this old phrase, like, don't confuse a clear view for a short distance. It's like, I feel like we had a clear view. I just thought things would happen faster. I overestimated kind of like what could be done in one year. But with that one, because it's so fun, I just kept going and like, sure enough, like, you know, it all, we, we, we, that was like the right thing to keep going.

There's a lot of other things, shiny things. And that was like the right one.

The one that was making no money actually costing me money. Cause one of the things I wrote in that doc is I plan to lose $10,000 a year doing that.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. But it'll be worth it because I thought, you know, creates like some serendipity. Yeah. And you kind of talked about that too, like content creating serendipity or like just being online and being like in the mix.

Yeah.

Chris Wise Fortune.

Liking a post or replying to something or putting, putting yourself out there. Who cares if someone doesn't like— when you, I mean, it's different for you now. If you post, there's millions of people gonna look at it, but like just for like a regular person, when you post like a tweet and it says like 116 impressions, it's got no like, that's all like, that's still some people that have looked at it and you don't know who it is. But you know, later down the line that could, that could come in handy. And when we talk about some of the stuff I'm doing now, I've gotten all my opportunities. Every single one of them has been like through Twitter or like through some like LinkedIn or some email or thing I've sent. And years later down the track, it's all come.

Well, tell the story about the billionaire.

So what happened there?

That started on Twitter?

Yeah, that was a— that was me just like saying I need a— I just made this like kick-ass investment and let me like, I want more people to know about it. So I was like talking to journalists and stuff like that, like, hey, write about the story. And no one was really taking the time. But there was one dude that was actually, yeah, on Twitter. He wasn't responding to anything else. I went on Twitter. I saw he's active there. I was just like, I just kept liking his post. I didn't actually say anything. And then he checked out my LinkedIn profile and we started talking. He's like, okay, yeah, let me write about the story. And it wasn't like a Forbes or anything. It was like a pretty small news site that it's so weird that they posted that article and a few days later, a billionaire read that article and then reached out to you. Exactly. Exactly.

That's how the framework— this is the framework king. Yeah, exactly.

Watch me cuss, baby. That's what I do.

Yeah.

Yeah. So that's, I think, you know, what you've done really well. So, all right, so let's get to the part where we break up. So at some point we break up. We worked together for a while, like a year.

I think it was actually a couple of years of like knowing each other and like doing stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. So we get to some point where you're like, you come to me one day, you're like, I want to day trade or something. And like, to be fair, you were actually kind of good at this. I remember one time we were on a call and. I was like telling you like some instructions or something like some action items. And then like there's like no feedback. And I was like, yo, are you listening? Like, what are you doing? What happened? Where is this thing on? And you were like, oh, hang on. Bitcoin just crashed to $3,500. I'm like, this motherfucker is looking at the Bitcoin price while we're supposed to be working on our very important crystal store or whatever we were doing, whatever, you know, scheme we were in at the time. Yeah. And I remember being like, like two reactions. One, like annoyed, like, dude, this guy's like not paying attention to— wait, Bitcoin crashed? Like, you know, he's buying. Should I buy? You're like, because you told me, you're like, Bitcoin crashed. I'm trying to, I'm trying to place an order real quick.

It was down like 60% on just that day. And everyone, everyone in crypto like knows that day. It was a very like—

it was like in March or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was. And like, it was like you just never see it happen. This is like, this is not some altcoin. This is like the coin. This is right. This is Bitcoin. And so when that happened, I was like, I've seen a few of these and I just wasn't a part of it. And so I was like, guys, my turn. Sorry, I know I should be working and listening right now. I was like, I need to act right now. And so yeah, I mean, I grabbed all the money I had. It was a couple of thousand dollars and I, well, I didn't just buy Bitcoin. I was like the degenerate in me. I was like, okay, let me try and maximize this opportunity. So I went on, people know BitMEX, I went leverage long on Bitcoin. So I took all my money, did that, And when I went—

and leverage long means what here in this case?

So if you buy $1,000 worth of Bitcoin and you buy it, you know, 20x leverage, that means you actually buy $20,000 worth. But if it goes down by even a little bit, yeah, you'll, you'll wipe out, you'll have, you'll experience a thing called liquidation, right? So getting liquidated is like your worst nightmare.

And I remember you were like, what, 4 or 5 grand?

Yeah, that's when you told me. I was like, I was like, come on, man. I was like, but wait, what? What's the price? And I went and I went and bought $25K that day too. Yeah. And so, which was actually an amazing trade. Like we made more money in that. We made more money in that 1 minute.

Yeah.

Than we did like, you know, 6 months of experiments together, you know, whatever, you know, 3 months of experiments that we were working on at the time. And there is a lesson there, which was like, you know, the best kind of like ideas don't all just come from your head. Like, you know, you're at the time, I like intern chief of staff, but you were like, this is a buy right now. I'm going to do this. And by following you, I kind of like got the benefit of that at the time. And, you know, Bitcoin would trade it up to like $70 grand or whatever since then. And then, you know, it's come back down to earth.

But my takeaway from—

Full 10x from that day.

Yeah. My takeaway was there's like, there's very few moments where you can make all the money versus like trying to make a little bit of money every single time. And I think like, I'm not a day trader. I don't think I'd go back to being a day trader or whatever, but I think all the money is made when there's like a few key decisions that happen maybe once a year or once every few years, once every few months, whatever it is. And you just have to act on it with like, it's a bit degenerate. You have to like, there wasn't a lot of thoughtful planning around, I'm going to buy Bitcoin because of, this mathematical equation, that's full time. It was just times like this doesn't happen every— right, all the time.

So let me act on it in the moment. I was like, this guy's a fucking degenerate, right? Like, I didn't even know exactly how an option trade worked. I was like, okay, this is crazy. But at the same time, you're right. Like, if you go read that Buffett quote where he's like, you know, there are moments or seasons where, you know, the clouds fill the sky and it's just about right and it's about to rain. And in that, he says, in that moment, let us not come out with spoons. But bathtubs to sort of like make hay. There's also, you know, Naval has a quote that's similar to this, which is he's talking about luck. This is one of the versions of luck is being able to recognize an opportunity. Yeah. So it's, it's the version of luck. It's like he calls it level 2 or whatever, or he's not the inventor of this. I just heard it from him. But, you know, the original guy who wrote this, he basically says, you know, it's sort of luck favors the prepared mind.

Yeah.

So anybody could have seen that price. And most people, when they see something going down, they get scared. You were like, this is Bitcoin, Bitcoin flash crash, blink decision that this is a good bet for me. Like, whatever, risk-reward adjusted. Yeah. And, you know, you were correct in that. Later I'm going to tell a story. So you come to the States, we fly you out, and I remember we go to a restaurant and we invite my buddy Sully and we're talking and Sully's like, okay, Sean, like, you know, tell me, like, what, what are you excited about? Yeah. And you go, I'm excited about this company called Animoca. You had told me about this company 3 times at this point, and you were like, I love the stock Animoca. I like the stock. It was like you were like the GameStop guy, right? You're like, I like the stock. And I was like, Animoca, I've never heard of this. Sounds like a yogurt. And then I was like, why do you like it? And then you told me something I didn't even really ask, but I was like, what does it do? And you're like, oh, they're making these like bubble games or something like that.

Okay, whatever.

Later, when we're at this lunch, I was like, hey, Sully built a mobile gaming company and sold it for whatever, $100 million more. Tell him about that. What's that mobile gaming company? And you started telling him. He's like, okay, interesting. So I'd heard it like 4 times from you. Never took action because again, I was not at that time listening in probably the way I should have. That's an investment you made millions of dollars off of.

Yeah.

Tell the story of how after we stopped working together, you go from intern to multimillionaire in a very short, like how long?

Like, yeah, it's a very short amount of time. So at, so I've known about Animoca, it was an Australian listed company, so it was on the stock market and initially bought like a few thousand dollars worth and it did well, went up like 4x, something like that. So I was like, okay, great. That's, you know, I've done, I've done my, done my thing here. And I, I was looking at it as an investment, so I didn't sell it. And then the Australian Stock Exchange, they came after it and they were like,, you guys are dealing in this weird crypto stuff. We're going to have to delist you.

Well, they weren't crypto initially.

They pivoted to— Yeah, they pivoted.

Yeah.

So what about the time when I bought? So I bought them initially because they had an announcement and they were like, we're going to do a thing called CryptoKitties, and we're going to work with them. And so I saw that as like, this was before like a pretty boring robot company. Now it's like a sexy crypto. Yeah, it's like a sexy crypto thing. It's like, how do you value a blockchain game? Like, this is like think things that are like hard to value is kind of what I like because nobody knows what the price is. Right. So like as a degenerate, I like that. And so, yeah, so anyway, it did well.

By the way, none of this episode is financial advice.

This is actually NFA.

Me just laughing at the craziness of this story. So, so let's, let's tell the story. So you, you buy more.

So, yes, I bought it. It got delisted. And so I'm like, holy shit, my money is gone.

How much were you in at that point?

It wasn't a lot. It was like $25,000 that it became. Yeah. But to you, that was a lot. That was— yeah, that was everything to me.

Yeah. So you put everything you have, which is $25 grand at the time, it gets delisted off the stock exchange because the exchange is like, you guys now do crypto. We don't know. We don't like crypto. We don't know what crypto is.

Yeah.

Now you're liquid stock. You can't even sell.

Yeah, I can't sell it. And so this was like—

tell me this. I'm laughing at you. I'm like, yeah, I remember you told me this. You're like, dude, I got fucked on Animoca. And you're like, it's delisted. I'm like, wow. I thought you'd probably just lose money because the stock goes down. I didn't think you would lose money because you just can't sell it anymore. Yeah, but you did something even crazier. You doubled down on crazy.

So tell us. So throughout that year, I did a few things. I learned about like secondary markets or something I didn't— yeah, I wasn't really exposed to before. I learned about that. I did a lot more research into like what they were doing. And I've always been in the— and I was the perfect person because I, you know, I had a Minecraft server when I was a kid. So in high school. So I understood how if you turn these in-game items into something that you could sell, this is a win-win for everyone. So there's that. I was a gamer at heart. So when you, when you, and I was in Bitcoin way long before, maybe 2016. So when you mix all of that together, I was like the perfect person to see the light. I was like, okay, what they're doing is actually something that I want to get more exposed to. And you know, why buy a bunch of different tokens and companies when I can just buy the get exposed to the people that I think will be the overall winners here. And so once I, you know, got— had that conviction, I was like, okay, well, how do I— I can't market buy the stock, right? So I was like, how do I actually buy this thing now? And this was like a year it's been delisted. So in that time I was working for you and another guy and I had a few other bets that did really— Afterpay was one of them that ended up being—

You told me about that one too. Yeah. We were talking about buy now, pay later.

Yeah.

And I had met— Max Levchin from Affirm. Yeah, I was like, oh, this was a great startup idea. And you go, oh, we have actually Afterpay is better. Yeah. I was like, bro, your little Australian version is not better. You're like, no, look at these numbers. It's better. And that stock just went—

that went crazy from there.

You told me like really early on that one.

So I got like the little edge there.

So that was, that was like a little hack.

You're like, I don't have satellites to track cars, but you less legit, you follow the guy on Strava.

Yeah.

And I saw he was at the Square offices. You're like, they might get bought.

So the guy from Afterpay, the CEO, was at— he was in San Francisco and he was like pretty close to Square. I was just doing his run and I was like, this— there might be something. I didn't know what was going to happen. I'm like, I feel like a partnership would happen. But then, you know, Square came out and bought them for like $30 billion or whatever. And, you know, the stock went crazy. But anyway, I made a bunch of stuff. I made money from doing trades like that and working for you guys. All right. So how do I buy Animoca? I want to buy more. And, you know, the way I went to like Facebook groups initially, which is—

you told me you were like, there's a Facebook group of people just like commiserating.

It's like, wailing.

Yeah. Recovering Animoca stockholders were just there bitching and moaning.

And so, so yeah, buying it for like what discount?

Like 50%, 80%? It was more like 80, 90% discount to what the last—

I remember when you told me, I have the Slack messages when you told me I'm buying it for, you know, 10 cents on the dollar. Yeah. And I'm like, bro, you're just lighting money on fire. Like, you're going crazy. Like, what's going to— like, that's an insane reaction to the bad news bears. Yeah, well, I'm going to like double down. But it worked.

So I did.

I think I—

I put everything I had. It was about $100K that I just like, this, this should work out. It's also like if I lose all this money, all right, I'm in my 20s.

I'll like— you told me, like, you go, you're like, I'm 20 years old.

Yeah, I'm just going to— I'll just like get a job and I'll save up again and I'll invest. I'll just—

I've got—

this is the time to do everything, take all these crazy bets. I don't have kids. I don't have anyone that depends on me. So yes, I made the bet. I did all the transactions. That itself was like a bit of a crazy thing because they take some time to do, to do private transfers in Australia. Like the documentation for that. The people that were handling the transactions, they were taking a long-ass time. So one of them, actually the biggest transaction after Animoca announced they're now worth $1 billion, they did a raise. I was like, do I even have these shares? Because it was still taking time to process. I'm like, I put the money in the escrow account. I obviously ended up getting the shares, but yeah, it was like this whole new world of, all right, I wasn't like an angel investor before. I didn't understand how to do this. I had to just like, kind of claw and dig at them.

Do they even know you're like, do these guys know they're dealing with like a 20-year-old counterparty in these transactions?

No, no, no. Like they had no clue that they were. Yeah, yeah. That was, yeah, it was pretty like, these are, these are like pretty serious legit guys that were, I mean, they thought they were, you know, shoveling dirt onto me and then, right.

I was, they're probably laughing. Yeah.

Yeah. Their perspective was let me give dirt to this person. And I thought I was buying a gold mine. And so I was like, All right, let me, let me do this. But I remember I, and it, a lot of this, there's a lot of luck involved obviously. And so when I bought it, you know, I thought this was like a very long-term play. Like after 5 years there might be something here, but it was only after about 3 months. So I bought it, the valuation I bought it at was like $30, $40 million. And a few months afterwards they raised it a billion dollars. And I remember getting a call, there was like this Hong Kong fund that reached out to me and because I, you know, I've always, I had to like flex a little bit to people and I put online that, you know, I bought this company. So you're up 50x. Yeah, I'm up. Yeah, it was, it was worth like, I think $2 million. And I was like, holy shit. Let me like, let me like, I'm not, let me like have a think of what to do here because people want to buy it. And yeah, I had a Hong Kong fund that reached out and was like, we'll buy all of it.

We'll give you $2 million today. You're 21 years old or something.

This was actually right before they actually announced they're raising $1 billion. Some fund probably heard they were going to raise $1 billion. Them were trying to get it off me at a discount. So it was like, I think the initial offer was like a million dollars or like whatever. And I remember calling my dad, I was like, holy shit, like this is worth a million dollars. And obviously like brown parents, you know, this is a million dollars. You took this to Jared Bett. They're like, take the money. Like, what are you doing? Take the money right now. And so, but you said, I was like, just wait a few months, maybe this will be more. I was like, I don't think that. I'm like, this is it here. And especially 'cause I was tracking all the numbers, especially NFT, like volume, like NFT volume sales. And I've been tracking this every single month and for like, it was like a flat line. It was like someone was dead here. And then in this month there was a little uptick. So I'm like, this, these little upticks don't just like start and end here. There's, there's some like craze that goes on here. So I was like, if this is worth a billion dollars now and this, this, the hype is just starting now, let me like ride this wave.

At the peak Animoca was worth what?

At the peak, they raised the latest round with $6 billion.

Who knows? No one knows. I mean, I was with— I met, I met Yat and I met the board. It was a few weeks ago in Sydney. And the, the real thing here is I forgot who said it, but they were like, never count your winnings unless it's like cash in bank. It's realized. And so I was like, hey, you have to exit. This and the way to exit it is either I sell it privately. All these unicorns, they're at massive discounts right now. So it's like I could do that. I like, you know, at its peak it's worth 8 figures. Do I sell now for 7 figures and cash it in? That's always like a decision that plays on my mind, right? Otherwise, you know, they have plans to list and do an IPO.

And what you told me at the time, because I was like, dude, this is the thing. I was like, hey man, listen, as your pseudo father, father figure here, you should sell this. And you were like, I see what you mean, but you were like, what do I need $2 million for? You were like, I don't have something I'm going to go do. I'm not going to change. I don't want to change my lifestyle. Like, I like my lifestyle.

Yeah.

You were like, I'm just going to look to invest it somewhere else. And if I think this is still the best place to invest it, I'm just going to do that. And like, you know, if I lose it, I'm so young that like, whatever, I get the story and I'll just keep going. Like, you know, I'm not— and the way you said it, like, the— my meter went from, oh my God, this guy's insane to like, honestly, I see his perspective, which is that $2 million changes most people's lives. But you were like, I don't think that— that doesn't get me where I'm trying to go.

Yeah.

And in fact, you know, if I still believe in this, I just want to see where this goes. And for, you know, for a while, as crypto, as NFTs, you're right, like became the thing that year.

Yeah.

You know, there was sort of like a peak moment in that where it became worth more than $10 million, right? So it was like, would have played out very well. Timing is always very, very tricky. Do you look at this as I was trying to try it, I was trying to time a bubble, or do you look at this as I believe in this company and I still believe in this company and that's why I have the stock?

Believe in the company. And also I was kind of seeing this as like there's, there's like a few people that have like these life holds. It's like, you know, you hold these, like, this is a lifetime hold. This isn't like you buy in, you sell out, whatever. And also I was convincing myself of that. It's like, I'll buy this and, you know, when this becomes like the next Tencent, I'll have a couple hundred million dollar stake. And that's how, and I didn't have to do it. This was like the only investment I had to do. I didn't have to make all these other investments. There's still some like part of me that believes in that. It's like, I still see a pathway where like in the next 20, 20, 30 years, whatever. This is like a $100, $200, $300 billion company or whatever. And it's like, I have, I've got a pretty decent, you know, stake in that. And so yeah, that's what I was like convincing myself of. That is a bit less now during times like this, but I still have something here where I'm like, okay.

Is it hard to not just get attached like identity-wise to like, I don't want to be wrong? Yeah, I've made that mistake before. Like, I think, you know, especially this is such an extreme case. It's one specific thing. You were so right. You were boy genius.

Yeah.

Then it crashes, but you're like, am I now boy idiot or am I boy genius? Is this the moment where I held through the tough times or did I just fuck up and I need to learn that lesson? Like, yeah, really hard.

Yeah.

How do you deal with that?

Well, I think, well, I went into, let me just like, do something. So I was like, I was still investing some money on behalf of other people and I was going around and meeting, meeting founders and stuff like that. And that's why I'm like, I'm doing something else right now.

So, well, okay. Yeah. You have other bets.

Yeah. I've got other bets. So that's what got me through it. I was like, if this goes away, I need to make sure that this is the next big bet. Right. I don't need to be, I like, I don't need to be right on this one. Like for, you know, if it ends up the way it's going, I could, I've got time to make more bets and be really right on something else.

Yeah. And also you had done so much degenerate trading that like you don't emotionally mood swing like most people. Yeah. The money is all actually like becomes play money in a way.

Well, aside from Animoca, I had a bunch of other token investments, especially when Facebook renamed to Meta. Remember I was buying up all the metaverse coins, Decentraland, Axie, Sandbox. And so I experienced, you know, making millions of dollars like liquid cash. I also, I learned a lot of lessons there. I also lost a lot of that money when I didn't manage my risk post, post that. But I experienced like the numbers just became like you're looking at the screen. I have no attachment to it. There'd be like those days where I'd be up a couple hundred thousand dollars. I'm like, holy, obviously I spent a lot of it. I was like, I was, you know, all my boys were treated well.

We went out, I went out, we all eat.

Yeah, it was like I was a pretty shy, nerdy, nerdy guy, right? So I didn't really know how to talk to girls, but If you want to learn how to talk to girls, get rich. I was like, I had—

it's like a—

it was like a huge confidence boost. I was— yeah, I was—

it just gives you the confidence. It's just the confidence for you, which—

yeah, I think it was a confidence.

It was like, even if she rejects me, I'm still— I can go look at my MetaMask later and feel good about myself.

Yeah, it was— it was more like—

yeah.

And also for me, like, having $2 million in a bank felt like a billion dollars to me.

Of course.

Yeah, I'm like, I'm spending a lot and it's just like, it's not going down because cause I'm like, I don't have kids, I don't have family, I don't have any, I have no obligations whatsoever.

So even a lot didn't put a big dent. What'd you, what'd you do?

Anything stupid? So yeah, I got an apartment, I got a, I got a Tesla. I spent like, there'd be weekends where I'd get like limos out for me and my boy would get like, like I remember like for my birthday we got like 3 limos. We drove down to the Gold Coast, which is like, you know what Gold Coast is in Australia.

Dude, I'm so happy to hear this cause when I, Like, I don't know what I was paying you back then. It wasn't much.

The very first thing was $30K a year, I think it was.

Yeah, we started at $30K. I think it went up after that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

To maybe like $80K to $100K. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I was paying you then. And I remember at the time being like, oh, this is not going to work. This guy's getting like super rich doing these like crazy investments on the side. Like, yeah, it's not going to make sense for him to have a job at some point, which is great. Like, my goal wasn't to have you work for me for 20 years. And it was like, here's a young entrepreneurial guy, come get some reps with me, come like just get you off the traditional path.

Yeah.

And then like, I hope you go do big shit and like, you know, I could be your biggest fan and all that. That's kind of what's happened here. And I'm, yeah, I've had my popcorn, you know, watching, watching you do this stuff and it's being totally entertained the whole way. Yeah. Cause you definitely like had like a roller coaster. You're kind of like those like WallStreetBets kids basically.

Like, yeah, I was on WallStreetBets like since I was in like high school. Like I was, yeah, I was always on that forum. There's, equivalent in Australia, there's a thing called Hot Copper, which is like the equivalent of WallStreetBets. And on that I was like the most active person I'd got. And my nickname was Mr. Silicon Valley because I was just investing in tech stocks, right? And I'm like, if you go on, like everyone can look at my profile, it's like I'm, I'm tweeting about Animoca. I'm like talking about Animoca on that platform. And there's another company called Brainship that ended up becoming like a multibillionaire because the AI craze and stuff like that. I was constantly looking at anything to do with what is like the next 100x stock. Because for me it's stocks, right? I kind of invest in—

You told me the same story. A billionaire takes you out to lunch and it's like, what's the next Animoca? He reads the article and he's like, I got to meet this whiz kid. Takes you out. He's like, what's the next one?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You shit your pants immediately. You're like, I don't fucking know.

Yeah. Because during that time, like, I'm— I mean, this was the ZEP era, right? So I'm like, everything I'm telling people to invest in. It's going up and up and up. And, you know, I'm a genius. Yeah, I'm a genius. And so I was like, oh shit. But I truly believe I was like, Animoca just raised $1 billion. I was like, you should, you should invest in Animoca. Animoca is the thing. That's, that is the next thing. And he was like, okay, whatever, blah blah blah.

And in the next few days, but inside he's like, goddamn, I love that confidence.

Yeah. Next few days he ended up becoming like the top 10 shareholder in the company, bought out tens of millions of dollars off the stock. And then obviously, you know, Animoca didn't stop at a billion, you know, so he made, you know, over 9 figures in that.

So then that's— Did he tip you a little bit on the way out or tip the dealer?

There's that comment. Fair enough. Yeah.

So. All right. So you go through that crazy journey. One of the things that comes out of that was you were then on behalf of this guy plus other people, you were doing other investments.

Yeah.

One of them is Shuffle. Let's talk about Shuffle. So you had Slack'd me a while back and you were like, hey, crazy story. I think on the pod I was like, can't say who told me this, right? Yeah. Now it's all— now it's like way more public. But at the time you were like, hey, there's a company called Stake. Yeah. That is making unbelievable amounts of money. You were like, they had like a whatever, $800 million dividend last year. Like that's just like the profits they took out. You're like, this guy, one of the owners, I don't know, how old are they?

They're like, they're in their like late 20s, mid-20s.

Yeah. Like 27 years old, bought a $50 million house in Australia. Yeah. And another guy bought like a, whatever, $100 million house.

And it's like, that's how you know someone's like rich, by the way, when they're, yeah, buying like—

Go look at the real estate.

Yeah. That is like, you know, that when they're buying an asset like that, like they just—

People didn't know it. The articles are basically like mystery, you know, mega millionaire buys $50 million home. And then it was like they had two companies. They had like a software company that makes like—

game consultant for—

yeah, it's like, makes like the gaming software to go play like the games. And then they have Stake, which is the casino, the like basically crypto casino. And they're like, you know, intertwined companies or whatever.

Yeah.

Little Alameda, you know, FTX-ish, you know, I'm getting some vibes here as I describe it out loud. But either way, like Stake has been, you know, it's become like huge and they have Drake playing and whatever, gambling and shit like that. So you meet these guys who are doing a competitor to that in a way.

Yeah.

How do you describe Shuffle and tell us about like this crazy space? Because I only know what you told me about the stake thing at the time. Yeah. And then since a bunch of news has come out, like kind of validating what you said, tell me about the space and tell me.

Yeah. Like 20, young, 20-year-olds basically.

Yeah. And these are all people that's like, and we've all, we've all kind of been through the same thing of making a lot of money, losing a lot of money. So we can kind of like lean on each other in that way. Like they, we understand each other in that.

So by the way, this happens in like, it's happened in online poker. I remember that like the rise of online poker and the kind of poker kids who all made it and they all kind of Lived in houses together and figured out how to like each like beat the game together, basically. Same thing happened with social media. So like the TikTokers or the Viners who all went and lived in the same building in Los Angeles, right? Collabed with each other, plus traded tips, plus like got brand deals for each other. And they all like rose up way faster than the people who were on their own or didn't have the kind of connection.

This was my Juntaugur.

Yeah.

So, um, Yeah, so that's how I met them. And I was like, we all kind of agreed a lot of the background of the Shuffle team, they come from like the big exchanges. FTX is one of them, BitMEX, Crypto.com, that's all their backgrounds.

So we all had the Harvard standard of the sketch world.

What is that? There's like some place that's like, they just made it their business, some country, country, right?

Not city.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Curaçao. Yeah. That's the, that's the place.

Where the hell is Curaçao?

What is Curaçao? It's just a place where you can, I mean, anyone, if you want to get a license to do like an online crypto casino, you could probably spin one up in like 6 weeks. And it's very easy.

And that's their model. They are, they're like, we're open for business for casino, for online casinos, basically. Yeah. And like that's where everybody goes to get their—

Yeah. Like we're, we're, we're like in the same structure as Stake and, you know, all the other guys. We're all under the same license and there's some risk to that obviously. Like, what happens to our license? How long can you sort of play this game? And you have to sort of calculate what, what amount of risk you wanna take there. But yeah, that's, that's, it's exactly the same as these exchanges that were out, out, out, you know, in the Seychelles or, or Bahamas. And so, we saw that and we're like, okay, here's a clear difference between exchanges and casinos though. Exchanges are raising tens of billions of dollars and they've got all the fame. Whereas, you know, if people just understood, if this was more public on how profitable these casinos are and how they're very similar businesses to exchanges, then, you know, there would be some re-rating or valuation for these casinos. And so that was like, that's the—

But a lot of these investors and funds, they have like a no vice clause, right? They just can't invest in they can't invest in gambling or porn or whatever.

Yeah.

Even though there's money to be made there. So I think like that's one of the other reasons is like, yeah, some people just either themselves individually morally say that or their fund charter basically prohibits them from doing those things. So they're just like out on it. Yeah. Even if they know it's a great business. I mean, who doesn't think a casino is an amazing business?

We raised a seed round and that was like the hottest few months.

My biggest regret was not investing. I tried to invest in them. Yeah. It was like, like, oh, it's like one entity here, here. And I was like, oh God, like if I have other people's money, if it's my own money, fine. Yeah. But when I have other people's money, you know, I have to like, you know, think twice. And just in that time it like closed or whatever.

Yeah. But anyway, like that's, we, we all agree that in this like next cycle, whenever it is, could be 5 years down the line, who knows? But in the next cycle for crypto, we believe that there will be 1, 2, or 3 casinos in the top 20 of, of all the coins. And that's billions of dollars of of value that we think that, you know, we could, we could do. And a big difference with us is like, like I'm on this podcast right now, like we're not anonymous, like we're not like these people that like all these crypto casinos, usually they're like very anonymous people. And I mean, if you're putting your money into a platform, you want to know who's behind it, right? You want to know. So these guys are—

but how do you like all the— if you follow all the FTX stuff going on right now, I'm like really into this trial. It's like my soap opera right now that I'm paying attention to.

It's your Roman Empire. That's—

there's my Roman Empire. Exactly.

Do you—

have you been following it? And also, like, how do you feel about that? How do you think, like— because it seems like crypto casino is like risk times risk in that sense of like, I don't know, something between, you know, malpractice to like, you know, the craziness that comes with, with just that amount of money flowing through something. Yeah. And you said you have people that worked in some of those places. What did they— I guess what stories have you heard? And I guess— I don't know, like, not like Ishan spokesman, you know, like, not you professionally, if we can just like, my friend, like, how do you think about that stuff?

Yeah, it's like, it's, I mean, being in crypto already, you already, you have like an appetite for speculation. And so anyone that's already in the industry, it's like, you're, you're taking some, you're taking some risk on, okay, there is some like regulatory risk already that one day this license might close down and your business is screwed up. And so you have to be kind of smart and calculated about that. It's like, okay, what are the other licenses? Can we start building it up? We had to build our entire platform in a modular way. So if something happens to one license, we can split off, let's say our casino, and then put a license to a sportsbook and offer it in the different regions.

So it's just like Lost. It's like we had to move the island.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You remember Lost? He's like, we moved it.

Yeah. So there's some regulatory risk. There's some like—

It's like, uh, if we can make a, um, whatever, self-driving car, right?

People are going to want it. There's no market risk, but there's technical risk. Can you even build a self-driving car? Yeah. But this, there's no technical risk either, right? It's like, I mean, obviously you have to do technical work, but it's not That's not the risk in the business. It's all regulatory. It's all regulatory risk in this, which is so different than like 99% of the other startups I look at. Yeah, very few times you just get regulatory risk.

There's also just like actual risk that you have to manage of your book, like limits that you like. We will sweat sometimes, like when we— because we had to start upping the limits. You know, there's some high rollers that come and go like, I want to do a $10K blackjack hand, I want to do a $25K blackjack hand. And you're just like, like, okay, holy shit, we have to, you know, if they have a few good runs, it could be all of a sudden down a couple hundred thousand dollars. And I see your revenue is not always guaranteed. That's also like the biggest difference in this, in the—

it starts with the traction. So you guys launched, I don't know when.

In February of this year. Yeah.

What's the— what can you share traction-wise?

Super impressive. Crazy. Um, any good stories about like, I don't know, how did you bootstrap it? Where'd you go get your first customers? How did you, because that was your job.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, cause you'd be like, oh, I'm in I'm fucking in Asia right now, uh, you know, meeting people. I'm like, what are you doing in Asia? You're like, I'm, I'm building the brand. I'm figuring out how to get this thing off the ground.

Well, this was like a really— the, the first thing that I, I don't know why I didn't really know this, but the people that come and play on your site, if they like to gamble, you know, they probably also have some other vices. And like, they're probably not— some of them are probably, you know, can get very angry very easy because The whole thing is about either you make money or lose money. So when they make money, obviously they're happy. When they lose money, you know, right, this place, especially this beyond like, I'm going to find out where you live and I'm going to find out like, well, so that was like the, when you talk about your first 10 customers, like your first 10 customers are pretty rough people that you have to do. So I mean, the first thing we went to was we're all a bunch of crypto kids that made a bunch of money and then we gambled it ourselves. So we're like, we already had a lot of other crypto kids that made a bunch of money and, you know, like to gamble. So we went to those guys first and like, hey, come, come, you know, plan our website and test it out. And we would, you know, there's little tricks and stuff of like stuff with like deposit bonuses and like, yeah, like, yes, standard kind of standard, like sportsbook promotions and stuff like that. One thing that I think we did that was, oh, that, that's pretty interesting that we found out was, okay, we should stop spending so much time trying to get thousands of people who will deposit like $10, $20 or whatever, because they'll come on, they'll come on your site and it's good for them to play, but they will lose $5 and then spend 48 hours in your support. You know, I'm going to kill you. Where do you guys live? I need my $5 back versus like, okay, let's, let's maybe try and find customers that are, you know, not like that. And we got pretty lucky in some parts of Asia, especially Japan, right? Like they are, They are people who bet really big and they're very respectful and they're very like, they don't waste any of our time.

Like they will lose money and play with honor. Yeah.

So it's like, okay, these are the customers we want. Now we know the customers that we want and that's good for the business. And yeah, we started making some pushes there and, and trying to find, you know, this is a pretty heavy like affiliate business. You want to find, you want other people to go out and do the work because you can't do Facebook. We can't do Facebook ads. We're prohibited from doing Google. So you can't do PPC. So you have, you have to find really creative ways of trying to acquire customers. And yeah, those—

yeah. Well, this is why, like, Stake, I think, bought— or they created Kick. Yeah. And they're basically like paying Twitch streamers, you know, gobs of money, reportedly like $50 million, $100 million contracts to come play because they're like, oh, these are popular people. One of the things they'll play is we'll give them money to gamble on our platform. They gave Drake like tens of millions of dollars of like, go play, show people that you're doing a $20 million bet. Yeah. And are you gambling $20 million one night? It makes you look like a baller. It creates great content that's going to go viral and get you likes.

Yeah.

And all those people are going to see that gambling on Stake is fun and Drake does it right. Like, that's like their—

yeah, that's accurate.

That's my perspective.

They're seeing their reaction.

They're—

yeah, you're seeing the reaction in picture with the whole thing.

So it's not only are you educating people about how to play it and how to like— this like next level in terms of, I guess, like player value as well. Like, like they will deposit and, you know, they'll play, they'll lose, and then they're watching their favorite streamer play again. They're like, all right, time for me to also deposit again. So we found out like the affiliates or the influencers that are really like, they have a Discord channel or they, yeah, they have a, you know, they're constantly like live streaming. Right.

Those people make the most money. Something you said, like, we would not like, rather than have you have a million followers, we want you to have, you know, 2,000 people like active in a Discord that you talk to all the time. That's more valuable, right?

Like, and I think this doesn't just, this isn't just for like casinos. I think like for e-com. And like there's people that do Facebook groups and anywhere there's like a concentrated, like you have like those thousand loyal fans or whatever, those customers are worth, yeah, all the money.

We did an influencer campaign. We spent $100,000 on influencers, probably the first like paid influencer campaign we'd done. Yeah. So we put out, I was like, let's try $100,000 and we're going to spread that across these. Like, I think we did 7 influencers, I think. Right. And so these are people who have like, you know, let's call it 250,000 to like 3 or 4 million followers on Instagram. And I shit you not, some people, some of those people who have a lot of followers literally had zero conversion, zero. Like, dude, I could post on Facebook and get one conversion. Like, it's crazy. Some people kicked ass and it's like, what's the difference? I've noticed that, you know, the Instagram has this one feature, which is like when, um, not everybody has it, but like you can broadcast. So like, I don't know if you've seen this, but like Israel has this like almost like one-to-many group chat. Uh, you can send a message and they can only emoji react. They can't like, it's not like your fans can chat back, but it looks like a chat. Right. And I noticed that the people who have active versions of those where they'll just be like, oh, you know, my favorite mug.

Yeah.

And it'll get like 3,000 like likes there.

Right.

That's a way better signal for who actually converts versus like just a generic post or story or follower count. Yeah. Which is like, you know, neither here or there. And I think it's a really moved product. You can tell like the difference in it.

It's also just about them being like very high intent. And so I think about the people that would go into that broadcast channel in the first place, it'd be like a small percentage of like that person's like most loyal, like fans or whatever that are active and, you know. Right. Yeah. So I think for like that, that could be applied everywhere, wherever you can get like, who cares about trying to get, you know, 4 million impressions? I just want to get, I want my product in front of like the thousand most, I keep using the word degenerate, but like not degenerate, but like, you know, whatever the thousand people that are, by the way, I use degenerate positively too.

When we were hiring, we used to, you know, companies have like corporate values and it's like integrity and honesty. And like, it was like the Everybody has the same values. It's like, don't kill somebody or something. I don't know. Ours was degeneracy. Yeah. And people were like, why does it say you should be a degenerate to work here? And we were like, that's what it is. Like, that's what we want. We want people who are, who like, when they work on something, like there's just two types of people. There's some people that like, you know, they work to live and some people live to work. Right.

Like, right.

Yeah.

And I think that like whether people like the idea of a crypto casino or that makes them feel like really crazy or whatever, I think that the marketing lesson about how these guys market themselves is like one of the best, like marketing hacks that created a multibillion-dollar outcome was this one realization that, hey, let's pay these influencers and celebrities to specifically do livestreaming on Twitch, which is not the main marketing channel for 99% of other brands. And let's give them money to gamble so that people can watch the sort of thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Yeah, live in real time. And that is the best marketing for our product.

I respect that. I also think for those guys, I think they're really— they're like one of the most fascinating entrepreneurs that come out of Australia because I think for Kick, it's not— it's actually— I think the goal here is, all right, they've now made this $5 to $10 billion crypto casino. It's like, where's this? They want to go more now. They, you know, Twitch was valued at $40, $50 billion. I think these guys legitimately just want to go in and, you know, although they want to use the money to beat Twitter, they want to— yeah, they want to use money to like— this is their next thing to get them to like— I think they want to leverage— they were already working with all these streamers, paying them millions of dollars to gamble. It's like, Well, let's actually just also pay you guys $1 million to stream, but on our platform. It's like, I think they saw a sort of gap here. They came at the right time. But yeah, I don't think it's just for gambling. I think these guys truly, you know, love—

there's no way that works because streaming doesn't make that much money.

Yeah, yeah.

There is no way that that works in the sense that, you know, they would really have to be betting that they could and You know, okay. So I don't think it could work, but here's the case where maybe it could. So I remember, so TikTok now is obviously massive. Yeah. Do you remember when TikTok came out? So like, yeah, it was Musical.ly and then they did like a Musical.ly and Musical.ly was doing good, but didn't like make it to like the full mainstream. And it was kind of still seen as this like kiddy lip-syncing kind of, it wasn't like TikTok today. You can go learn shit. Yeah. You can, you know, people make you laugh. You can promote your business. You can sell products. You could, You can do anything. But at the time, Musical.ly was literally like tween girls lip syncing, right? That's like all it was, right? There's like more of what the product was. So then they rebranded, it's like they get bought, they rebrand to TikTok, which like I remember laughing about the name, like what is that name? And they literally spent $1 billion marketing that app to make sure every teenager has it installed on their phone. And like we had a kid who was working for us at the time that was in high school, but he would come and work at our office. I was like, dude, what do your friends think of TikTok? He's like, oh, it's like the joke. But he's like, I gotta say, like, everybody knows TikTok. He's like, there's not one Filipino person in my school that doesn't know TikTok. He's like, we don't think it's cool yet, but like, I gotta give it to them. Like, 100% of every kid in my school is aware that there's a TikTok app that they want you to download. And like, they actually brute force, like, created the network effect.

I guess there's a world where Kik could do that, but it's also, I think they're banking on maybe they do something where the friction to buy something on livestreaming is lowered and it, yeah, that's a whole new like avenue of, I think there's, I think they know that the traditional model is not going to ever work and that let's just get all the eyeballs and then maybe they can flick some switch somewhere. And you know, like Instagram Reels makes like $10 billion a year.

I don't know how, but it's like, Like, you've plugged into the world's greatest ad engine in the world. Facebook's ad engine is the greatest ad engine. Maybe Google's one or two, but like, it's— the Reels makes so much money because it's plugged into one of the greatest moneymakers ever.

And livestreaming is— livestreaming commerce is like a pretty huge thing in Asia. It really is. And so if it can somehow work in Western markets, I think like there's something, I think, there where they could flick the switch and then You know, this is how they go from, we're already worth a couple billion dollars, how do we get to 10, 20, 50? And maybe they don't care about how much they're worth, but what's like the biggest game? Yeah. What's like the next, they've already won one game. It's like, how do we get to the next? So I think, yeah, that's super, like, I think more people should probably know about those guys.

And are you like, I'm going to be a degenerate forever? Or are you like, you know, I'm just going to do this for this period and then I'm going to do something else?

Well, I'm, I really wanted to be a part of something that could be huge and that could grow really fast. And so I want to do that with Shuffle and ride this wave. Like, will I do another thing in sports betting or gambling, whatever? I don't know. Maybe not. But like I mentioned to you earlier before, it's like you make your nut and go do your noble mission. I think I might.

Justin Mayer's quote. Love that quote. I love that quote, not because I think it's right, but because so many people, when they hear that, they're like, that's what I'm doing. Because it's such an easy out to like justify anything that you're doing in the moment. Because you're like, I'm going to do the noble mission later.

And so I love it because it's hilarious how much people love that quote.

I don't know if it's good wisdom or bad wisdom. I can't tell. But what, by the way, what ideas do you have? So yeah, you know, MFM, you know, that's what we do here. I'm going to, I'm going to get out my notes app really quick.

Okay. And we might have already talked about some. Just really quickly, there was, before we were talking about kids that were playing RuneScape and stuff like that, I literally have already one in here. I had incubator around kids who are building businesses within games.

I like that.

I 100% agree. I think I tweeted this out. I go, what people think of the like winners' backgrounds looks like. Yeah. You know what the world tells you? It's like, you know, good grades, he goes to a good school. Has good internships and like, you know, after-school activities, runs for student council. But it's like, what I've seen is like what the real winners are, are like the kid, the guy who's running his own gaming server when he's 14.

Yeah.

Kind of because he just wants to be able to buy games. It's not like even running it as a business, right? Like the sneakerhead, like sneaker flippers, basically, you know, people that are like hardcore gamers that are like become best in the world at a video game that's like super competitive. Yeah. That type of thing, like, you know, which requires skill, strategy, communication, like tons, like obsession. Those are pretty translatable skills. Yeah. You know, speech and debate is another one. Like there's these like unorthodox backgrounds. RuneScape is one that's crazy. The RuneScape mafia. Yeah. The number of rich young people I've met that the common denominator is Yeah, we used to be like, I didn't play RuneScape, but they're like, yeah, RuneScape has like the marketplace or the plaza or something. Yeah. And they were like, yeah, we used to, we used to run the plaza or the marketplace. And I was like, geez, this is something. I have an idea around that, which is I was like, I want to create kind of like the Outcast Conference. So basically what I want to do is be like, these are actual hotbeds of talent that nobody's really talking about. I want to invite like the people who do that. So your point of entry is like you need to hit one of those criteria. You run a gaming server or like Yeah, you're like elite at this. Like, you know, I found this one thing called Mindsport. It's like someplace you go that you play. It's like Olympics, but for nerds.

So you don't do—

you don't run. You play chess and then you play backgammon and then you play like— you play like this, like advanced version of chess. Like, you know, you play Go, you play like all these games and whoever's like the best across these like 10 really hard strategy games is like the Mindsport champion.

Yeah. And you know, that guy's a freak.

You know, those guys are all going to be amazing as soon as they decide like, okay, it's time for me to have a career now. Yeah, as long as they just get to like funnel in the right place and don't just go be a McKinsey drone, like, yeah, you know, those people are going to kick ass. So I'm like, oh, I want to make things where it's free for them to attend, but you got to be the best of the best. And I want to just be able to like curate that talent and be like, I'm going to place my bets on these people now. Like, hey, if any of you ever start a company, just remember this goodwill.

Yeah.

Of me bringing you here, paying for all of this because I want to be your first investor. Like, I genuinely think that's going to be like one of the highest ROI things that I could do.

Well, I think a lot of them— so a lot of them get lost to like banking or something like that. And then there's a lot of them as well that they just don't have guidance coming out of the first thing that they do. And so they fuck around for maybe like a few years and then like—

That's why I'm going to Outcast because like they probably feel like I'm kind of like crying a little bit. I wasn't doing all the shit that the other like achiever kids were doing. But it's like, no, no, no, trust me, let me show you 10 other people that are like you and then they're like, oh, I see myself in them. Like, I can do it too. This is the basis of like a lot of sports. Like you see a guy that's from your hometown and now you start to believe you can do it too. Why do you like Australian entrepreneurs so much? Like, what do you care? It's like, because they're from Australia. I'm from Australia. If they made it, I can make it.

Yes, that's cool. But had you never heard of any, you would probably also be banking somewhere, you know, and also like I think a lot of them when you spend your time or your childhood, whatever, like in a room doing all this stuff, you're whatever, you're making money or like you're learning business skills, but then you start lacking in other areas. Like maybe, so then like that, that's setting up, setting yourself up for failure to waste some time. Whether it's then afterwards, you know, you have some girl troubles or afterwards you don't know how to do something with family or whatever, blah, blah, blah. That, yeah, I think that that's why.

Oh, that's a great idea. I'm just gonna have a kissing booth. I'm just gonna have a hi girl. It's like, yo, if you haven't had your first kiss, just let's just do it now. And we're gonna get that all out of the way. We're gonna kill, we're gonna crush these like lingering doubts in your head.

Yeah. But yeah, that, that was one of them.

I mean, but what was your idea?

It was, I, I, the idea was like, just like a, like a, like a, you know, giving these kids like mentorship and like just like incubator. Yeah. So it seemed like a little Y Combinator thing for, for these weirdos. What else?

Yeah.

There's a, I was just at a conference. I was just really surprised. I mean, something within conferences where I think maybe more people should make conferences for like cashed up niches because especially if you do like the exhibitor model where it's like, oh my God, like they, you know, and some of these people are the one I just went to, they're paying a couple hundred thousand dollars for a booth for a booth. So maybe that starts off as you do your newsletter, whatever you do, like the low effort thing first, the low price, low effort thing of newsletters, whatever, build that audience and then just immediately go into. Like, I'm surprised you guys haven't done a conference yet because I feel like that would, that would make like an MFM one. Yeah, like an MFM.

Um, another one that actually kind of related, um, I think this is kind of boring, but like a CRM for, again, like cash shop niches. So we're right now looking for like a new CRM platform, and you know, everyone goes to like Salesforce, whatever, but they operate in like 100 different verticals, right? And so who's going to get our $10K a month? It's going to be the one that is still, yeah, built specifically for iGaming, which is our niche, whatever. So right now, like, we're making a decision and we're going to go with some other smaller— we're not going with Salesforce, we're going with this other one. They're going to get our, you know, $10 grand a month, whatever, because they're specifically— they're specifically for iGaming, right? So that's like another one that's a little bit boring, but it's like if you could just find like some niche—

what are these other cash sub-niches? So like one, for example, I think is like farming. Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know.

I mean, any real estate is another one, right? Yeah. Within that, you could even be like senior living or—

Right.

HVAC, you know, like things like that where you know that everybody there can spell EBITDA.

Well, it's like, it's, I think for anything that where the interactions or the behaviors of your customer is very, it's very high value, but it's also, it's very different to like maybe like an e-com or whatever, like, or like just a transaction. Like on our one, it's like you, you have a bunch of games that you like and you spend, you know, we want to know exactly if you've lost this amount of money in the next few hours, we want to like make some contact with you and stuff like that. We can't really do custom behaviors like that with like a Salesforce or whatever else CRM platform because it's, it's very tailored to a very broad niche.

So anything that has like, so you're saying high value customers and then basically figure out like First principles, what should this look like for this niche? Yeah.

Yeah. I think something like that.

That's pretty good.

I like that. That'd be a good idea.

I think that's a very like, that's a very good sandbox for somebody that wanted to explore.

And we just worked out this before, there could be someone that does like, so in the gaming biz, there's, you know, VIP, like VIPs make up your whole entire business that we're talking about. There's actually other verticals as well where VIPs is like your thing. You should actually, every single business probably has VIPs. That they're just like not interacting with. So maybe like VIP management software for e-com, right? For whatever, you know, even for like retail businesses or whatever, like you probably have, yeah, you probably have like customers that will come in. Let's say I started getting into like the hot cold exposure therapy stuff. So I started going like, how tech bro of you. I was like, I started going into these places like, you know, 3, 4 times a week. But, you know, if these guys just would have know that like I'm paying this much amount of money, right? Come upsell me on something else or do something else. Like I think that even like retail businesses, like just if you were to focus less of your time on trying to, you know, broaden and like getting, you know, paying on these Facebook ads to get the next 1,000 customers, what about the 10 that's going to spend like, you know, you know, whatever, 5, 10 times more on the business. So that's probably, I think some VIP management software for Yeah, that's guys, that would be—

they could sit on top of whatever, whatever niche you choose. It could just sit on top of the current software and just be like, yeah, but this one is all about your VIPs and we're just going to extract the data that we need and then give you the actions or the recommendations or the triggers in order for you to like, when should, when should we reach out?

What should we give them? What do they like? It's that could, that could be one. This is probably not so unique, but I think I don't know if you've used these, used people like this, but like agencies for content that do, it's like full service of like thumbnails and editors. And I don't know how hard that is to find, like people that really know their shit about creating online content. Cause it seems like every single person wants to like, you know, be a personality or brand right now. And so people that, I mean, a lot of these are like UniKids that know how to do this, but it's like exactly how to connect those middle, yeah, be the middleman for The unique thing to know is this is like done for you.

So DFY. Yeah. So like people who do this e-com now, honestly, I think they're pretty scammy, but they're like, hey, we will just hand you an e-commerce business that makes cash flow.

Right.

It's like anytime someone promises you passive income, just like run away.

Yeah.

But like, um, that's what they're promising. And a lot of people, these companies that are promising this are making a ton of money. And one of the reasons why is it's tempting to, instead of just saying, here, we'll teach you Facebook ads. But now you got to go figure out the rest. What product? What's the supply chain? What's Google Ads? They're like, we're just going to give you the whole thing. Yeah, turkey. And so, you know, there's a version of that. Like, there's video editors and content there. There's, you know, copywriters, but like, you kind of want the whole thing, the sort of like done-for-you package.

Yeah, I think like a full-service agency for all that sort of stuff might, might work out. Trying to think of what else.

Let me see.

Oh, this one's kind of related to like maybe what you did with Shepard. But so recently we like, we, we had to expand to Japan, right? And that is like, none of us speak Japanese. It's like we don't know how to scale in that country. And so, well, what we had to do was like, first let me research what other companies have done. And I remember reading, I think maybe it was like a Chamath video when he was at Facebook and he was like, We hired some MBAs and they flew over to Japan. They came back and, you know, a few months went by. We weren't growing. We're like, what's going on? We fired those MBAs. We got this like young woman from that who was actually living in Japan. And within the first month we were seeing growth and we're like, wait, what? Okay, what are you doing that these MBA people haven't done? She's like, well, you know, on, on the Facebook profile, like we don't care about your relationship status. We care about your blood type.

And it's just like stuff like that that you would only know localization, no translation.

And to find those people was like, it, yeah, it's, it's pretty hard to, to do that. So maybe if there's some like agency where, like, so we hired uni kids that are, that speak native, like fluent English so we can communicate with them, but also they're fluent in, you know, in Japanese and doing that, like, you know, our growth has been like 10x of just like, they know the market in terms of, they like, by the way, none of them knew anything about like gambling. They don't need to know that. We can teach them that, right? They just need to know like, What are the people like? How do you communicate with them? How do we localize all that content? Do everything to cater to this market where— and it's in certain markets very important that you are respectful and you appear like you're not— you appear like you're not a foreign company that's trying to attract the customers. You appear like you're born out of that country, right? So, so doing that whole process for me was very hard to find, like the right people that spoke English. That also was native in Japanese and knew all that. So maybe if there was some like shepherd-like agency to help you, okay, you're expanding into this country, here's like your, you know, growth assistants that are native to that language and can do all these things.

That's cool.

I like that.

Yeah, there's two crazy things on that. One, if you look at the Facebook growth chart, like one of the key things for Facebook was getting the site translated and localized across like, and they did a they had to do some crazy Wikipedia-like shit to get the whole site translated because there's so many different— I mean, the Facebook site was kind of complex at the time. And so I remember seeing that. That was very impressive to me. Second is there's a subversion of this, which is just to do business in certain places, you have to establish an office. Yeah. Like China. You can't do business there unless you have a local office. You can't do business certain places. Can't pay— you can't pay local people unless you have a thing or whatever. And just that can take like a year. Yeah. And so like, I remember with Twitch, when we're at Twitch, it's like, oh yeah, we're trying to put our servers here. We're trying to do this here. We're using— we had to use Amazon's people to do international expansion. Like Twitch, even as a multibillion-dollar company, didn't have like that expertise in-house. Right. And they would be like, yeah, it's going to be 12 months. And they'd be like, we're finally live in whatever so-and-so country with our office. And I'm like, what? Like, And they're like, this has been a year of effort. I'm like, that's insane. Like, that seems like, can we turn that to software somehow? Like the way that Stripe Atlas did for company incorporation. Like, is there a Stripe Atlas for the world in that way?

I've got a little funny story about the localization stuff. So, um, like everyone probably listening is probably thinking like, oh, but why don't you just get AI to translate your stuff? And it's, it's not there to the point because we were using just ChatGPT, a bunch of guys that were non-Japanese speakers and ChatGPT. And, you know, we're talking to like very high-value customers, right? And, you know, the AI hasn't really caught up in like tone or like certain like nuances. And so apparently, like, you know, we were talking to a VIP like they were a kid, like we're saying good boy, like stuff like that. And yeah, it was.

Yeah, some people are into that shit.

Yeah, these people like, and then, you know, yeah, definitely these people definitely were. They were like, they stopped playing with us. They're like, yeah, yeah, like disrespecting people, blah blah. So Yeah. So getting like native— Yeah. Getting like, especially languages like that, like getting like native people to know how to speak. Yeah.

No way. So one of the things, one of the projects I worked on when I was at Twitch was like, we were trying to grow like crazy in Brazil. And so I was like, all right. Luckily we had a group of people, like there's 4 people in an office in Brazil that like no one was even talking to really. They were like, they were so at arm's length from headquarters. And I was like, hey, I'm here and you guys are like my key people. They're like, oh, awesome. We have so many ideas. Like, Can you help us do them? We're like, yeah. Well, I was like, what sorts of ideas? And they were like, well, you know, our, uh, everybody here uses YouTube. And so subscribe is like how you follow people on YouTube, but on Twitch, subscribe costs money. So if everybody here, they open the Twitch app and they click subscribe to follow someone they find interesting and it says pay $5, right? They're like, dollars? First of all, $5, that's a week of groceries. And secondly, this site, you have to pay to watch people? Screw this. They don't even know that it's free to watch. Right. It's like, can you just change the text on that button? And I was like, oh damn, how many more of those are there inside this app? And another one was like, we were like trying to come up with like these marketing campaigns. We had like marketing, like our marketing experts like coming up with these ideas. I asked the local team and they were like, hey, can you buy the, can you just like give me your credit card? I want to buy 5 iPhones. I was like, iPhones?

Why?

He's like, in Brazil, an iPhone is like a gold bar. He's like, this is like, he's like, we're just going to give these away. Trust me, you'll get like 20,000 people watching the stream. I'm like, what? He's like, this is a gold bar. Imagine somebody just giving out like golden bars. He just kept saying that and he did it. And it was just exactly that. It was like all of a sudden was just number one most watched guy on Twitch that day. It was the guy giving away one iPhone and he, he milked it for like 4 hours. He's like, I'm not giving it away until we get like 30,000 people in here.

Yeah.

And he's like, and it worked. It was insane.

Yeah, there's stuff like that that we find out like every week of like, oh shit, you guys actually do it this way. And by us, have you heard about what MrBeast does with this? Is it like the dubbing the videos?

Yeah.

And like, he's getting crazy engagement because they're like, that's Spider-Man. And he's like, yeah, it cost me like an extra 5 grand, but like, look at what it did to my page.

I think they turned that into like an agency where they like, they do it for other people as well.

Yeah. I wonder if anyone has done like a roll-up of YouTube channels and brands or whatever. Like that seems like, seems like every niche ends up being like, you get rolled up. Yeah. Get rolled up and do that. So I don't know if I've heard of Spotter. No, I haven't noticed.

That's like the equivalent of like Taylor Swift selling—

ExactoMasters, whatever. Exactly. So this company is like, I don't know, raised a lot of money. I don't know. The key is underwriting. It's like, I don't know if they correctly underwrite these deals or not. Yeah, but like MrBeast sold a bunch of his back channel, a back catalog, a bunch of other people have. So I think they've like either raised at a billion dollar valuation or close to doing that for YouTube.

I have a friend that I work with who manages Speedz. I, you know, Speedz the kid. He manages his IP. I don't want to call it like, uh, whenever there's a video of Speedz going viral on YouTube or TikTok, whatever, they will claim it and then they make revenue off. They'll, they'll actually, they'll run ads on it. And I think, I think very quickly, like just Speedz alone has generated like a million dollars so far. And he's like, we should just be doing this for like, not just speed, like all these different creators. Yeah. They'll probably down this, you know, create like a big business that, so that might be also like another, like within that.

Because the way that works is if your video, if your IP is being played by somebody else, you can claim it and either they take it down.

Take it down. Yeah.

Or you get all the ad revenue.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think, and you should just do, yeah. Go to the ladder, like get, do that. So, 'cause they found like, they were like, just like for people, creators like Speed, like a lot of the eyeballs that is on him is not on his videos. It's on the millions of clips. Compilations. Compilations of stuff that are, that's going unclaimed. Like you're just like easy money that you could be claiming and getting. So yeah, that's probably another thing that people should, you know, look into and do this.

This is so good. This is great.

These are some, these are fun ideas.

I'm glad we did this, man.

This is, yeah.

Awesome. And yeah, Ishan, where should they follow you or go? What can they do?

Yeah, you can follow me just like Twitter. Ishan, Ishan Haq, but the last few letters of my name's cut off, so it's just Haq. So you're S-H-A-A-N. Yeah, I'm I-S-H-A-N-H-A-Q. That's, that's my Twitter.

Nobody knows what H is in America.

H. Exactly. H. But yeah, follow me on Twitter if you're on LinkedIn. Look me up.

Put it in the description. Dude, amazing. I'm proud of you. You know, this has been amazing.

I've gotten the validation. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, I'll say it. I am super impressed.

And I just—

I'm so glad you kind of— you've taken, you know, the ball, you just run with it and you're taking just such interesting shots on goal.

Yeah.

And like, whether any of these work or not right now is pretty secondary. Like, yeah, by the time you're 30, Your scoreboard is going to be filled up. You're going to have made all the successes, whether it was this or that. I don't know which one. Yeah. By the time you're 30, you're going to have it all done in terms of like, you know, the achievement side. But you're also just going to have had so much fun.

Right.

And like, you know, these lessons you're learning about like hiring these kids in Japan because of this. Yeah. Those are the real lessons of business. And so I'm so glad you're getting them, man.

This is so cool to see. Thanks. I appreciate it. I've got one last question for you. Yeah.

Okay.

I remember you said, so you, I forgot, like your one life goal was like, I think it was like you want to educate, was it 1% of the world or whatever?

What I said at the time was I want to be like for 1% of the world, I want to be their favorite teacher. Yeah. Like, you know, which was at the time, I think like 60 million people or something like that. I was like, if 60 million people thought like, cause like for me, I'm like, oh, like I learned so much from Tony Robbins or Tim Ferriss or Naval or these people like I'd love to just be that for people. I think that's like, yeah, I know what they kind of have done for me.

That'd be so cool if I was that for other people.

I think that would be like the highest calling for me.

Yeah. Yeah. And do you think, so is that A, is that still the case? And then B, like, do you still want to do that? And then B, like, what do you think will be the, what do you think will be like the avenue that where you achieve that? Like, is it podcast? Is it because you're already in the ears of, you know, all these people. Whatever the stats are now. Yeah, very different. So that's where I started.

Yeah.

But, um, do you think you'll be podcasting?

It's not actually that goal. That goal I think was arbitrary. Like, who cares if it's $60 million? Who cares if it's 1%? It was ambitious.

It like, it sounded good.

Yeah, it sounded good. But I'm like, I only need to say this to myself. Like, I don't, I need to believe it for myself what this, what this actually means. And that's not something I like needed to die to do. You know, like I didn't like, feel like it was do or die to be able to pull that off. It was something that sounded better than what I really meant. It was also kind of virtue signaling. I don't even know if teacher is the right word, but I guess the thing that I think about now is almost like the D, I stripped the ambition out of that and just made it really simple, but more true for me, which was I want to be somebody that if I was 21, I would look up to this person. I'd be like, That is what I want to be. That guy's awesome. And that's a combination of things. So for example, part of it is making content, being out there. Otherwise I wouldn't have even known that this guy existed. Part of it is do cool shit so that like stuff that like I respect, uh, more, I think it's cool in some way. Some of it is like build a cool business. Some of it's like, uh, you know, this Outcast conference, like that's cool. I'm glad, like I like his reasoning behind that. I liked that he went and did it. Or like, you know, you know, just giving somebody, you know, a bunch of money because you believe in them. And like my version of philanthropy, it's not like donating to the cause and going and sitting on the board of some nonprofit. But like, if you see somebody who's got a dream, like fund it and like make that happen. So I want to do cool shit that like I would respect. And the last part is the way you come across. Like, I know that my favorite people were charismatic storytellers. They were funny, they were likable. They didn't feel like they were bullshitting you. They had moments where they were honest and like, they could have just not shared that or they could have said a sanitized version, but they chose to just be real. So I'm like, those became my like scoreboard is like, would I at age 18 to 24, like, would I have thought this guy's the man? And like, I know even at that time, I was like, if I saw someone that was awesome, like Elon Musk, oh, he's amazing. I remember watching some documentary about him on the plane before he even started like Tesla, I think it was like a long time ago. And I remember thinking, this guy's awesome. But he had like had 4 marriages at that point. I was like, that's not winning to me. Yeah, I like that he's an outlier in this one domain, but like, I didn't want to replicate these other 3. So like, you know, to me, I'm like, the thing I would have respected is somebody who's like, just like they're a really great dad. Like, for example, one of the things I want to do instead of Instead of doing another business or write a check is like, I want to go coach like a high school basketball team, like Mighty Ducks style for a year or two years or something like that. Yeah. And I'm, if I remember, if I had, if old me, if young me had heard that some guy was doing, some rich guy was doing that, I would have been like, I don't care if he's not the richest or most successful, that guy's awesome. And I bought. And so I just kind of want to be the person like, you know, what's that quote like? Be who you needed when you were younger. Yeah. Not needed, but like be who you would have admired when you were younger. Right.

And that's the goal.

Yeah. Not the like exact goal I had before, which I don't know if it's better or worse, but like it's more true for me.

So I know, I remember, I think you were saying on some pod, you're like, you, I think you went to LA or something. You met a bunch of like rich people. And at this point now I've met a bunch of billionaires and other cool people. And for the most part, like a lot of rich people are like miserable and And like we mentioned before about the kids that stay in their room and build these businesses, they lack other components of life. And I see that reflected throughout all these people that are, yeah, they've made a bunch of money or they've done this one cool thing, but they've neglected every other part of their life. And it's like, okay, it's, there's, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, you know, trade. I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to be in those shoes. It's similar to what the, I forgot who it was, but some guy talked to the Instacart CEO and he was like, uh, are you— how old are you? And he was like, I'm 33. And he's like, I would be— and this guy's worth billions of dollars. He's like, I'll do anything to be 33 again. Um, and like, he would trade, trade all his money. So it's like, I see that a lot more now. And, you know, I'm hopefully maturing a little more because before I was like, yeah, I just want to get all this and get the money and stuff like that. Um, but yeah, I think that's something cool. And, uh, one thing that— one of the— probably the most important thing— not important, but like effective things that I learned working under you was, I mean, I remember maybe it was, maybe you're talking to Sully or Sully taught you this, was like aggression, like just being like aggressive in like getting things done and what you want. Like I think most people don't do that. Like they don't follow up or they don't be annoying. Like they don't try to be annoying. When I started applying that, I was like, okay, things are moving way, way, way faster.

Yeah, I remember probably like, because I used to kind of, you were like my dear diary. It's like I come home and I'd be like, I don't even know what time it was your time. You know, I'd be like 3 AM. Yeah, 3 AM. And I'd be like, hey, I'm ready to work. And like, I'd be like, I met this guy or I noticed this thing. And I would like kind of like use you as my sounding board to like play some of these lessons back.

Yeah.

So it's cool to hear what like stuck. But yeah, that, that idea of like intensity is the strategy, meaning like Yeah, this guy's not smarter than me. He's not more knowledgeable than me about this. He's not like— there's no special aura around this person. What is it that's made this person so successful? And what, what do I— what's the difference between me and them? And I just noticed I was like, oh, he doesn't have these like imaginary walls where it's like, you stop here, right? It's just like, no, like, okay, we want to do this. Like, I remember one time we wanted to do a deal. The guy who— we want to invest in this company. And he was like, I was kind of on the fence and he was like, what if we just wire him the money? And I was like, $2 million? And he's like, he's like, yeah, like, let's wire him the money. He's an honest guy. Like, we met the guy. He's like, not like a crook. Yeah. He's like, let's just wire him the money. And then like, I feel like that'll tip the scale. Once the money's in his bank account, he's not going to like want to like wire it back. And I was like, this guy's insane. And like, we had another moment like that where we were working on a— one of the founders was like, oh, I really need to raise this round. They're telling us this urgency. I really got to do this. We're running out of money. The pitches are not going well. The first few pitches didn't go well. Can you guys help? We're like, yeah, we can help.

When can you help?

Right now. Sounded like an emergency. Oh, we got a thing. And we're like, you got a thing? You just said this is like so important. Okay, whenever you can. They get on, they get on a call with us. We go through the deck before we, we said send the deck in advance. There's like 40 minutes before the call. What do most people do? 40 minutes before the call, this, we'll talk about it in 40 minutes.

Yeah.

No, no, no. So he was like, by the time the call happened, he'd already emailed back like slides 9 through 13 suck, eliminate them. Slide 4 is backwards, put it in slide 1. Slide 1 needs to say this. He had already given them the full first round of feedback. They were like, what the hell? So they were like looking at it and we're like, cool, let's just make these changes right now. And they're like, no, no, we don't want, we want to be respectful of your time. He's like, the thing that's respectful of my time is like showing that you're like full force going for this.

Not.

That you're not going to use my time. I'm here to help, but like, let's do the thing. Yeah, you want to make this awesome? Let's make it awesome. So they start working on it and they're like, okay, we, we know what we need to do next because we need to go pull some data, do whatever. And so we'll check back in with you whenever. He's like, you know, it was like noon. He's like, cool, like, let's check in at 6 p.m. today. And they're like, two calls in a day? And even I was like, two calls in a day? I've never done that with something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you ever scheduled 2 calls in one day with somebody? Like, it never happens. It's not that it's so crazy. It's not like running into a burning building, but it's kind of the business equivalent of running into it. It's like, whoa, that's unusual. That's like a highly intense way to do this. Yeah. And you could tell they were kind of shook by it. And then they did it. And at 6 PM, it was like still not, not like exactly where we needed it to be, or we realized something. And we're like, cool, 9 AM tomorrow, let's do it again. By the third day, we were like, this deck is in great shape. But these guys were like worn out. Yeah. And Suli was like, dude, I'm just getting warmed up. This is great. This is like what I live for is find the thing and laser in and just go for it. And like, who says we can't meet twice in a day? Who says that they said no to the first proposal? Well, let's, what if, you know, there is some number they'll do this at. What's that number? And like, you know, he'll just think about it differently.

Yeah.

That stuck with me. I'm glad that. Kind of that idea stuck with you. I say it out loud so that somebody out there listening will realize like, yo, my intensity knob is stuck at 6. Yeah. Like 10 isn't more hours. It's just like more focus and it's more intensity at the main issue and not self-limiting and solved by, by fake imaginary walls that don't exist.

Yeah. Yeah. You got to bring the energy. No small boy stuff.

That's what I— there we go. All right.

That's it.

That's the pod. I feel like I can 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 travel, never looking back.