$100M Founder Reveals The Secret To Making Data Profitable

All right, what's up? We got Anand here. People don't know this, right before the episode I ask the guest always, I'm always like, oh yeah, like, what's your role now at the company? And I always ask this, I say, how can I brag about you? How can I say something really impressive that you've done to give you credibility right away so people know that they should listen? And I was like, can we say that your company does over $100 million in revenue? His words were, yeah, I got in trouble last time I came on for divulging too much info, but you could say, yeah, around, what did you say?

Around the $100 million-ish neighborhood. Yeah.

Around $100 million number. Yeah. So we'll go with that.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's try.

You've come on before and I was looking at the comments and they were all basically, this guy's fantastic. Love his ideas. More of this guy. We need a part 2. We need a part 2. So here we are. Part 2 with Anand, the founder of CB Insights. Who has transitioned on to doing bigger and better things now, um, with the company.

I don't know. He's, he's transitioned on. I don't think he's doing bigger and better things though.

Other things.

Yeah.

Smaller for sure. Actually smaller and worse things.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm just chronically online on Twitter, so yeah, it's definitely smaller, smaller things right now.

And we don't normally do this, but, but actually we're gonna make an exception for you. I want to hear the founding story of CB Insights because You guys started out selling like PDFs and shit like that, and somehow that went from selling PDFs to starting a, a, you know, 9-figure company. So I gotta hear this story. Can you take us back to the beginning?

Yeah, sure thing. So, uh, I left, uh, American Express where I worked, Jan 1st, 2008, had written a book.

Were you a big dog at American Express or were you just like a normal guy there?

I was a vice president. So, you know, it was funny why my, my wife's father was like, oh, you're vice president. Like next you're gonna be president. And she had like no idea.

There's like 40,000 other vice presidents.

That's what I used to think too. I heard VP, I was like, oh, you're next in line.

Yeah, yeah. I was like, no.

But that's a pretty liberal job title, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like they hand those things out.

Yeah, they hand those out a lot to make you feel like you're doing well.

Well, give people a sense. You were making like $200 grand a year or something like that? Yeah. Is that like roughly?

Yeah, $200, $250. So, you know, it was good living, but I always wanted to do my own thing. Left, gonna do this consulting, financial crisis hits, Big banks, our main customer, they basically are worried about staying solvent, so they just ghost us. And I'm paying two guys from my old team out of pocket and I'm just married. So, you know, we're watching savings go down every week, every two weeks. And we worked in the credit card industry, so we said, what could we do in that space? And we started calling ex-colleagues who worked at like Capital One and Citi and other places and basically started doing this call it like a sentiment survey. You know, what do you think about delinquencies and loss rates? Like the metrics that matter in that space. And we'd give it back to them for free. And they just liked it 'cause they were like, oh, am I super optimistic and all my peers are super pessimistic? Like I need to recalibrate.

Why did you originally think that that was a good idea? Like usually I have to see something to even know, oh, that's a business. Like, oh cool, like did you see something that existed and you were like, we could do that for credit card data?

No, no. So I mean, in the beginning we just stumbled into tons of things. Like I was just like, I can't keep paying these people outta my pocket. So it was like we were doing consulting for a school, like we just kept our feet moving and anybody who would throw money at us, like we were like, yeah, we'll do that for you. Like it didn't matter. This was just an area, I had this guy Dominic who's my, you know, my teammate, he's like a savant on this stuff. So we kind of were like, hey, maybe we could do this. And we were like, yeah, it was just a guess.

Okay.

So we started doing GLG calls, you know, the expert network calls that was like making a little bit of money, definitely not enough to cover costs. And then we met this guy at this prime broker, and these are the guys who like settle trades for hedge funds. And you know, he was like, hey, I think we could sell this because the mortgage crisis was starting to like, kind of get, you know, figured out. He's like, I think credit cards is what people are gonna freak out about next. And Nick's like, the thing that, the beauty of what he saw was like, he wasn't worried about what his customers cared about today. He's like, this is what they're gonna care about in the future. And so we're like, yeah, cool. Like, we can't sell it, maybe you can. We, I spammed every hedge fund guy who went to Wharton that I could find. Like, nobody cared about what we had.

But what did you have? Was it literally just like you sent a survey to 20 people?

Yeah, it was a PDF that basically showed the trend of how people in the industry thought things were going in certain key metrics.

But how many people in that industry?

Oh, like 25.

And so you're like, oh, we have vice presidents from Amex, from Visa, from MasterCard, whatever. And the thing that they wanted was— the important data was basically like, are delinquencies, are defaults going to go up? Because that's going to spell— that's going to cause like a bunch of ripple effects. And that had just happened with mortgages, where if mortgages fail, which nobody thought they would fail, but when they failed, it caused all these ripple effects and banks went under and all this stuff. So, so as an investor, you needed that info, is that correct?

Yeah. So there's that macro view and some of it is like, hey, I hold $1 billion of American Express stock, right? And I need to put some number into a model that says how they're gonna do the next quarter. It's like a channel check, right? Like, you know, like people go to Apple manufacturers and try to figure out how many, you know, hard drives or whatever they're shipping out to figure out how many MacBooks are gonna be created. This is kind of like the, the digital equivalent of that.

So, um, they're trying to like front run the, the, the quarterly earnings report that's gonna come out later, right? You're basically trying to get inputs to guess where they're gonna be so that if it's bad news or if it's good news, you can adjust accordingly before the rest of the market knows this information.

Yeah. Like they're, they're living in like an information vacuum. And so this isn't like the number., but it's a little bit of in, in like leading indicator sentiment that they can use.

Sam, he said prime broker. Do you know what a prime broker is?

I, I do. I have, I have no idea.

Sounds, sounds pretty sick to be honest.

Yeah. Is that prime, like prime time? Like this is awesome.

Yeah. So my, I still, this is my layperson understanding. So there's people who settle trades for hedge funds. Hedge funds buy and sell stock and there's somebody who executes that trade. And what they would do is they'd bundle research as part of that trade. So they'd be like, hey, if you trade with us, I'll give you all these other research services. And so they would call these soft dollars. And I think these have been sort of banned and outlawed or changed since, but we got— at that time, they were all— this was all kosher.

And, um, why they're banned? Because you're, you're influencing people to do stuff?

Yeah, I think it was like, you know, they were— the stuff getting bundled in was maybe a little dicey, and they just said, listen, just charge them for the trading as if it was trading and don't do all this other, you know, kind of meshuggeneh that like, you know, it's like the prime brokers against the soft dollars.

It's like, oh man, these, I don't know whose team I want to be on. Yeah. Why is it called the soft dollar? What does that mean?

It's like for, for 100 grand you get feet and the PDF.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so yeah, so nobody bought the foot package, right? Uh, they, but it was a great price anchor, right? And so what ended up happening was A bunch of people bought the $50K package and the, and the $12K package. And, you know, it was like a build once, sell multiple times. So that was going really well. You know, we knew from the get-go mortgages had a, a lifespan of like the crisis had a lifespan and we knew credit cards would have that too. But it helped us put away enough money and got, you know, me paying the team out of that business versus out of savings. And then that's what funded CB Insights.

But here's the craziest part to me. 20 people is not a lot of people to survey. How long did the survey take to complete?

I mean, we would do this survey via the phone, right? And so like that would take, you know, I don't know, hour and a half, 2 hours per person, right? Because you like want to get commentary, right? It's not just you think this is a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, right? It was like trying to get You know, context around it. But yeah, I mean, it's not a large sample size. I think the big thing here is when you're dealing in big, big dollars, some information is better than no information, right?

That's, that's insane to me because basically like this, so the hard part is finding a problem that needs to be solved where like more information or a survey could, could solve it. But basically I could go on GLG, I can go on intro.co, I can go on all these websites, I could pay someone. $1,000 or $2,000 for an hour or 2 hours of their time, ask them tons of questions, aggregate all of that into a thing, and then resell it as a research report or a survey. And that's crazy to me.

Those companies do that, right? I think the challenge that you'd have if you wanted to rebuild what we were building was we knew all the people at the card companies, right? And they trusted us to give us, like, to have this conversation, right? If you just show up, Sam, and you're like, hey, Hey, chief risk officer at Capital One, let's sit down and talk about what you're seeing. They'll be like, I can't, I'm not gonna, I don't know what you're doing with that, right? So we were able to kind of, they knew us, so they knew we weren't gonna like do some incendiary thing with it, right? It was that we're gonna use this, we're gonna package it up into a survey, it's gonna be anonymized, so it's never gonna be a Capital One sees weakness or Citi's like flying on delinquencies, right? It was always like aggregated and anonymized. So yeah, like this, these are great businesses. Like they're, you know, data cooperatives or pooled data. It just trust is like the big thing that you need in order to get people in the industry to open up to you.

How much did you guys make, do you think, off the PDFs during that one-year run?

And what was your reaction at the time?

I was like, I don't have to go back to work at a big company. Like that was it. Like it was just relief. Right. And yeah, you know, it felt in the— on reflection, like we just stepped in shit. Like we just got super lucky that we met this guy Nick, that he had the foresight to think about pricing this way. So, but yeah, I mean, I was just thankful to be honest, because I was like, to go back 2010, 2009 after leaving Amex, like would have been going back sort of tail between my legs saying I couldn't hack it as an entrepreneur. Like the ego hit there. Would've been— that would've been the worst part. That would've been like devastating, I think, for me. So, so yeah, that was, that was just happy.

Jason Fried said something amazing when he, when we talked to him a few months ago. He said it's better to be extra weird early on because as a company grows, your people start acting more corporate. And so the more weird and unique you start as, hopefully it's inevitably gonna get watered down, but hopefully the watered-down version is still unique and weird. I didn't realize that CB Insights stands for Chubby Brain, and your original logo basically looks like me as an 8-year-old holding a brain, and the name of the company is called Chubby Brain. That is awesome.

Yeah, I like the name. It didn't work out. And yeah, we tried to sell Chubby Brain, like the service, to Goldman, and they were like, we can't use a service called Chubby Brain. And so And like, you know, they, they weren't, it wasn't just them being like hoity-toity. They were like, listen, at the bottom of every slide we put source for our data and we can't put source ChubbyBrain at the bottom 'cause it kills our credibility. And so that night, you know, John and I kind of went to a bar and we were like, we gotta change the name. And that's when we became CB Insights. So that was the, that's the genesis story of our name.

Sean and I have an LLC that HubSpot pays us. Pays us to, and I'm pretty sure he wanted to name the LLC something like ridiculous. Do you remember? I don't remember what it was, Sean, but I remember thinking, I'm like, I can't put this on an invoice.

It's like, uh, we're paying Hoodrat Media.

That's what it was. It was Hoodrat Media. Yes. You wanted to call it Hoodrat Media. Uh, and I was like, Sean, like no one was going to see Hoodrat Media other than the accountant paying the bill. And that's like the one person who we don't want to like think this is a scam.

Right. There was a, I don't know if this is an apocryphal story. There was some guy selling something online. It was like a crappy product and everybody would ask for a refund and then he'd send them a check, but the check would be from a company called like I Like Little Boys Inc. And so like nobody would actually cash the refund check because they were like, I'm not going to go to the bank with like that company on the check.

So. You said after the last episode, you said that people reached out to you and we're going to get to like a bunch of different ideas you have. But you said after the last episode, people reached out to you saying like, I want to do this data stuff. And you said they're running 100 miles an hour in the wrong direction and you wanted to correct people for who were interested in this. What were you going to say to those people?

And so what was your checklist? You said, so basically, who's the buyer? Like, do they have money and do they care about this? Two, what edge does the data give them, right? That was like number two, the most important thing. Is there a third and fourth criteria you have?

Yeah, it's really, I mean, if I boil it down, it's the edge, it's collection feasibility, like how are you gonna actually collect this information? And then three is opportunity. And on collection, the big one is, folks sometimes have a hack. They're like, oh, I got an in with this person and they can give me this exhaust data from their company. The problem with companies built like that is like when you lose access to the hack, the whole company's dead, right? It's kind of like supply chain risk in our world. Like if we bought all of our data from one provider and they decide to change the rules or go under, like you're dead in the water. So yeah, so how you collect the data is the other one. So yeah, edge, collection, and opportunity are the three that I would look at and really scrutinize a lot upfront.

Can you explain how those worked? Like, just to finish the story of Chubby Brain to CB Insights, successful company. What did CB Insights do on those 3 criteria? So, you know, who was the buyer? What was the edge you gave them? And then what was the collection feasibility?

And you've done this like in a really cash-efficient way. I know that you've raised a Series A, but I think you've said like you're not even sure entirely if you needed to raise that money. Do you still own a large percentage of the company?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That, you know, we raised late. We bootstrapped for 6 years. Uh, I mean, we were like, we're a very pain tolerant company, I would say. So we, uh, we raised after 6 years. So yeah, the team and I own like a, you know, a solid chunk of the company.

So there was an article that came out, uh, last year, uh, about 8 months ago. You don't have to say if this is true or not. I'm just reading, uh, the headline of the article. And it said, it says CB Insights to weigh $800 million sale. So if that were true, which you don't, I don't want you to even say if it is or is not true, that would mean that you could walk away with potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. Would you consider that to be a successful outcome given how like humbly the company started, or are you trying to go even bigger?

I mean, to say that's not a successful outcome would sound insane. Uh, so yes, that would be a successful outcome. I do think there's a massive opportunity in front of the business. And, you know, we hired a CEO earlier this year and he's a killer. Hey man, Leo. Uh, and, uh, so I think like, I think this business, especially with generative AI, has like a lot of legs to grow. But yeah, I mean, selling for $800 million back, you know, then, uh, would have been a fantastic outcome for everybody involved. But yeah, I think we can get even bigger.

What are some of the data businesses that you think have legs? So you said a lot of people reached out saying, hey, I got access to this data, and you're like, I, I don't think you kind of have it quite right. Um, are there businesses that you've seen or you think somebody should go build a data business in?

Have you ever had, uh, like an argument with your wife or something like that where it— like, imagine these executives describing the CEO, or that you're like, hey, it was a CEO any good? And they'd be like, he's good versus he's good. Do you know what I mean? Like, I feel like we're going to look at like, we're going to look at the inflection of your voice. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I would love to go. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Yeah. I mean, you can do sentiment on it. You can, you know, look at all sorts of things that I think could be interesting. And again, like, it's not going to tell you to buy or sell that stock, but it's another input. Right. And right. And then there's these activist shareholders. Right. And if you see like Hey, listen, over time, you know, X CEO, like the team is losing their faith in that person. Like now this becomes a reason for that activist to come and say, hey, you know, Joe, who's running X, like he's lost the team and stock performance sucks and they're not doing these things, right? So it becomes an input. And these are people who, the buyers here, like they're making hundreds of million dollar, billion dollar decisions. So I think that's another You know, interesting vector. I don't, you know, there's probably all sorts of insider trading sort of complications that you gotta deal with on that one. So don't run with that.

Sean, when you had, check out this Razor's Edge thing, 'cause I, you said that, I got fascinated. Anand, do you know how much money Razor's Edge makes?

I do not know that.

So you were like, this company looks interesting. So they're publicly listed. Their 2024 company guidance, um, over $1 billion in revenue, 33% EBITDA, about $250 million of free cash flow.

There you go, you heard it here first.

Very impressive.

Sean, when you had the Milk Road, because I know we thought about this at The Hustle, but I wasn't mature enough to see the opportunity. When you had the Milk Road, and even now as you have like kind of a mini media empire. Have you thought about data, monetizing it via data versus advertising?

I mean, I think once you start a data business, like you are now on a treadmill, right? Like you have to. Somebody's buying a subscription, right? So what Sean did was smart in the sense of like, if it wasn't working, he didn't have to keep doing it. Right. But once you sell it to an institution, now they're going to expect it quarterly or monthly. And now you sort of are on this, you know, now you got to keep doing it. Right. And so, um, so, you know, it's like you want to be thoughtful before you jump in.

There's two that I've thought of. I'll shoot them at you. Uh, these are half-baked ideas, but two that I've thought of in the past. You tell me if you think they'd be good or bad ideas. Uh, they're both very similar. The first one is, um, headhunting talent. So executive talent. So all across the tech industry, talent is at a premium, right? So somebody who's a, let's call it like VP, SVP and up. So all the way up to the C-suite, those people will make 7 figures. So millions of dollars, if not tens of millions of dollars as their package, um, when they go join a tech company.. And the way that the whole industry works is you have a 4-year vesting cycle typically. And knowing when somebody is ready to look for a new job is extremely valuable. Knowing where they're at in their vest cycle, that they might be willing to hop and switch. Um, I think that's, you know, valuable information that could be used in the recruiting business, which is typically just a services business, not a, a very data-driven business. And so one idea was to understand the vesting cycles of the top 1% of Silicon Valley talent in order to maybe create a recruiting— either a recruiting data business or recruiting service business on top of that data. That was the first idea. Quick reaction to that: it might be a bad idea. I never did it.

Yeah, I probably— I think the recruiting service business is a better idea than the data business. I think with data, when you have to try to get somebody to do a new behavior, that's really hard. Right? And so recruiters who are like used to, you know, it's really networky and it's very like, hey, I'll take you to lunch and like that kind of business. And then being like, hey, now we have data. Right? And again, there are some ones that are like really data-driven, but I would say generally it's probably not their MO. And so, you know, when you're like, hey, do this thing 'cause it'll make you more powerful that you've never done before, that tends to be like a tough hill to climb. But building a services business with this as your edge, I think is an interesting, could be an interesting idea.

Yeah, I like that one. I think, you know, VCs have these EIRs, entrepreneur-in-residence, which kind of are like that, right? It's like, you know, hey, I'm gonna pay you and you can figure out your next idea. I think the question I'd have is, if somebody just had a successful exit, is the amount you could give them gonna actually be enough of an incentive. But if you can figure that out, right, I, there was a firm that did, it wasn't this, but they would basically send term sheets to startups they wanted to invest in. Right. They'd just be like, hey, here's a term sheet. Here's a valuation. And like, once you see that, it sort of like incepts you. Like, you're like, oh, I think we're worth that. And you might not be worth that, but it would start the conversation. So I wonder if you could come up with the right number, do you just send a big mail merge to like all the founders who meet the, you know, fit the bill and then just see if that generates conversations for you, right? And worst case, they at least are like, they like you if you're not like a, you know, a D-bag in the meeting, they like you and then when it is time, they at least have a good impression of you. Like, yeah, it's an interesting deal flow idea.

Now that you're no longer on full duty at CB Insights, I know that you're kind of tinkering around with some other things and you're like in an interesting phase right now where instead of being theoretical, on MFM about which ideas you think are cool, you're actually, actually, you know, you're being practical. You're like, I actually may pursue one of these things. What are you thinking about doing?

IMG, if I remember correctly, it's like a school built mostly for athletes that are potentially gonna go pro, uh, based in Florida. And it was owned by Endeavor, which owns UFC and TKO and whatever, PBR, whatever else Endeavor owns, a large publicly traded company. And they recently sold it for, I think, $1.5 billion.

Yeah.

And it's, It's just a high school pretty much, right?

Is it a school or is it just a training facility?

You know, it's, it's a full school. So it's a boarding school in Florida. It started off as the Bollettieri Tennis Academy and then it sort of morphed into this. And they do all sports, you know, tennis, track, football, basketball. And, and they do summer camps like their big business. Their other big business is summer camps, right? Or camps, let's call them.

And dude, if you're spending that much money to go to that high school for track and field in hopes of getting an ROI, getting a return on your investment, that's That's like going into a quarter million dollar debt for an art history degree.

You know what I mean?

Like that, it ain't there.

The thing that they've done really well is, you know, they recruit really elite athletes and you know, those really elite ones might get a scholarship or, you know, there's like, let's say there's 5 basketball teams at IMG, the top team will actually get sponsorship from Nike and stuff that'll be used to defer or defray, you know, tuition costs. So that really elite athletes maybe get a free ride or close to free ride. You know, then everybody else who's probably quite good, but also might have a parent or parents who think like, you know, little Bobby and little Sally are going to go pro, who just have like visions of their kid going pro in something, will spend a lot of money. You know, I think tuition is like, you know, $40,000 to $70,000. Um, and then the camps are a great feeder for the school, but they're also like You know, parents want their kids to achieve a lot and they want to, again, you know, they want to give them a lot of opportunity. Um, and so the camps are, you know, I paint with a broad brush, like, you know, dad who played baseball, who always wanted to go pro, can't go pro, could never make it, you know, wants his son, you know, they think has a shot and they're like, hey, IMG is the best place to go. And it is. And then they, you know, and then they pay a lot of money for these camps. So it's a pretty brilliant model. They just got acquired by a company that's basically acquiring— I think it's a European company that's acquiring private schools. So private schools are just a giant business. And so they're acquiring private schools around the world. They're kind of doing a roll-up of those. But yeah, it's a, you know, IMG's, you know, great brand, you know, has had really legit athletes come out of it.

I love the idea of creating a school. I love the idea of creating it as a, as there's many variations of this idea, but creating as a boarding school for around entrepreneurship or a different model of teaching. So can you just like, here's what I want you to do. Can you give me the 2-minute impassioned rant, the rant on what needs to change and what you're going to do, what's broken and what you're going to do about it, but I want you fired up for this one.

All right. All right. So. Schools today are about compliance and conformity, right? That's what they do. And if you go back and look at how schools started, it was Rockefeller and sort of these titans of industry basically trying to create compliant factory workers, right? And so when you go to it, it's, hey, show up at school on this time, sit in your seat. We're going to tell you some tasks to do. When the bell rings, get up like a robot and go to the next class. And then at the end of the day, like, you know, we're going to dismiss you with another bell, right? And so what they've done is create like people who are really good at reading a map, you know, and it's like a scavenger hunt. Hey, I need some community service on my thing. Let me go do that. I'll start some bullshit nonprofit to look good for college applications. I'll play 3 years of a sport. And so this checklist that you have to do, you know, to navigate the map. And I think what we need is a school for kids who actually are going to build the map, like for explorers and developers. And so that's like what the School of Entrepreneurship is about, which is, you know, follow your curiosity and build stuff and like learn how to think versus what to think, right? I think entrepreneurship is a lot like engineering. You know, even if you decide not to become an entrepreneur, like you learn a way of thinking that's going to serve you well wherever you go. But yeah, the idea is like you'll go pro in business. You won't take AP classes. There'll be no SAT, ACT prep. It's going to be about, you know, learning and building. And it's really like experiential, right? So we're working on like having retail on campus. So if you want to learn geometry, you're going to lay out the floor plan of your retail store. And that's how you're going to learn geometry. It's not going to be, you know, hey, let's learn the Pythagorean theorem in a class. And then your kid's like, when the hell am I ever going to use this? So, so yeah, that's what we're going to—

are you going to raise money for this thing?

So we've got, you know, a few folks already. So we've got a decent amount of capital committed. This is not like my next startup in the sense of like, you know, CB Insights is going to check my significance box or success box. This is like my significance box, right? And so I might start 2, 3 other companies like I'm trying to We're trying to think of an engine to like build 200,000 companies. So this is like my next thing till like, you know, when I die at my desk, like this is the thing that I'm going to be working on. So it's not a, it's not like a VC-backed private school to exit. It's, uh, yeah. And like, I think the big thing is like recruiting formidable kids. And this is one of the biggest challenges. IMG has all these stats, like, you know, who's the kid who jumps the highest and scores the most points. We don't have that. So it's like, but the kid who has 5,000 subscribers on YouTube is probably the kid who should be at this school, not the kid who's like really good at standardized tests, right? A kid who sold stuff on Roblox or built a lawn mowing business. So yeah, but this, that's, that's the vision.

Where's your campus going to be?

Don't know. I think it's, you know, my partner on this is in LA. So it's, you know, the coast would be easy family-wise. Interestingly, red states are like much more open to education innovation. Um, and so like, that's a conundrum we gotta figure out. So we, we, we got a lot of work to do before we figure that out. If I was betting money, it's probably gonna be on one of the coasts just 'cause it makes logistics of life easier.

But, and what would that curriculum look like to teach a 6th grader to prepare for this stuff?

I think it's, it's not subject-based, right? It's like competency-based, right? So it's, um, you know, critical thinking or it's, uh, uh, public speaking or, you know, having conversations. Um, and so a lot of it is like, it's project-based and experiential, right? So, you know, what I mentioned earlier is like, we're trying to figure out how to have retail on-site with the school. And so the kids are operating and building a company. And so in that, you know, in order to build the company, you have to do algebra to build your model, right? You have to lay out the floor plan of the shelves in the, in the retail store. And that requires geometry, right? And so I think like, you know, I have a, I have a daughter who's, you know, 14 and like she'll constantly come home and ask like, hey, when am I ever gonna use this? Right? Like that's a common question. And so we, we're trying to find ways of integrating it organically into what you're doing so that you never feel like I'm learning something that makes no sense. And so that's, you know, what we're working on now. We're talking to some teachers. Who can help us sort of build out the lesson plans here and, and then, you know, kind of get going from there.

And the crazy thing about this business or the hardest part, in my opinion, it's like once Harvard becomes Harvard, it's easy to maintain. So like when you think about like all this protest going on, people are like, Harvard's going to shit, these colleges are going to shit. In my opinion, I hear that and I'm like, no, it's not. It's what's understood so much crap. Like, once a brand is a brand, it's really hard to ruin. But it's hard to convince your first group of parents to actually become a customer of yours. Uh, how are you going to solve that?

Yeah, so I actually don't think that's as hard. So I posted this on Twitter. I got a bunch of inbound from folks, um, who like really like the idea. And I'd say it came from two camps. It came from like rich tech people and then it came from, I'd say generally people in the middle of the country who are like, I have a son or daughter who's, I think is really smart, but who is struggling in the sort of cram, exam, erase model of schools. Like they're not good at like memorizing 50 state capitals, but they're like really good at, you know, building an audience on YouTube or whatever. Right. And they're like, I think my kid has more potential than is being realized. And I actually think there's a bunch of folks like that. So I'd agree with you, Sam, if I said, hey, I'm trying to recruit, we're trying to recruit Manhattan, like Upper East Side parents, right? Who like, you know, want like that old model. But I think there's a bunch of folks, and if you look at the homeschooling statistics and growth, like there's a lot of people who are unhappy with how schooling is happening in this country and they're just opting out. And so I think there's a big segment of people who feel like, you know, I've got a kid with a lot of potential who's just not— that potential is being squashed. And so yeah, I've had like a lot of good conversations with folks that, you know, I think the market for this is, is giant actually. And if we could recruit 100 formidable kids from each state, right? Like that's 5,000 kids, you know, I think that's very, very feasible.

You have a few ideas on this list I want to go through. Can you tell us about these? So let's start with the first one, slime museums.

Yeah, to me these are like the new Build-A-Bear Workshops. It's, uh, out of the house, it's a kid's activity, kid's gonna be super excited about it. It could be a birthday party, it could just be a weekend, it could be whatever. And as the parent You know, you buy the $40 ticket, but it's never the end. They're like, the upsells are too strong in the moment, right? Because you need the video, you want— the kid wants the slime on the way out. It's basically like a gift shop on the way out. And, um, obviously these things have like a craze period where it becomes the thing and it gets written up in all the magazines and The New Yorker, and you see it all, all the influencers go. And then, and you know, there is some normal on the other side of it, but, um, It's interesting to see how people have reinvented the, the Chuck E. Cheeses of the world to be optimized around social media. Meaning, how do you do things that are going to be photo-worthy, um, that are going to be shared inherently, um, by people who are going through the experience? And also, you need to get kids out of the house, off their screens, doing things. It's, as a parent, that, you know, there's there's a huge need for that. And there's a kind of like a, a much bigger appetite because even if you do the slime museum once, twice a year, there's a lot of other weekends that, uh, that you could do something. So there can actually be many of these in this, this model.

And then, you know, obviously, by the way, we had this idea on the podcast like several years ago. I don't know if you remember, this is one of the drunk ideas, I believe, uh, in the— I think it was in the drunk ideas episode, might have been one of the other ones. I was like, why isn't there a neighborhood shop that's basically run, you know, by the HOA in a way, or, uh, you know, by the, by the members of the community that, and then all you do is wholesale in the, the, the products that you basically make, take the markup of the, uh, of the rest. And so you have a grocery store that's in the neighborhood, basically. Um, that's kind of what this is. So do they have the tech like Amazon Go where it auto figures out what you took off the shelf?

Yeah. So there's no staffing because that's the big thing here, right? Because what the property manager doesn't want is, hey, the store is not open because, you know, person X didn't show up. So this is 24 by 7 and you, you know, it's got the cameras and whatnot and, you know, again, like reportedly, and yeah, it'll just say, you know, hey, your total bill is X and sort of those convenience store prices, which tend to be, you know, kind of high margin. And yeah, you'll get billed, you know, either to some credit card or maybe on your, you know, your HOA or something. And, you know, the thing they talk about is over time they'll like learn to personalize like what's in the store, right? So if like, like, you know, this community really likes like, you know, certain type of Cheetos, like that's what they're gonna see more of.

So this company looks like it's like brand new and tiny. Like I can't find anything on the internet.

There's no founder, there's no CEO. I can't find anything.

It's really, yeah. So I, I was just talking to a friend of mine who's in real estate and property management. And so like he was telling me about this and he is like, yeah, they've got a bunch of facilities and you know, I think they're targeting like the Sunbelt, right? Like, 'cause if you're in New York City, you can walk to these things, right? But if you're in most areas of the Sunbelt, the Carolinas, Texas, et cetera, like you just can't do that. And so they're trying to solve that problem.

Yeah, so I think their app has 6 reviews, so you have to have their app to get into the store. It only has 6 reviews. So I assume this is either brand new or just not popular yet.

It's early days. I think they have a few facilities up and running, right? But, but yeah, I just thought like the way they're going to market essentially like they're sort of B2B2C, right? They're going to the property managers who then are blessing this and then they're going to, you know, the property managers, 'cause they have a vested interest in making money on this, are going to start promoting it as well to their community. It's like a, it's really smart.

Did you do like the napkin math on like what you think this could be?

I didn't do that. You know what I was trying to figure out was, and my friend didn't know yet 'cause they're in the negotiation phase, I was like, you know, How much do they need to make back before you as a property manager start making money and what's the revenue cut there? But I mean, this is like a scale play, right? Like, can they be the new dollar store in every multifamily kind of community out there? And yeah, I think like that's the angle. And then, you know, I don't know if there's an— if are there certain large multifamily property developers and managers they can go to and get all of a sudden, you know, hey, We're now all of a sudden in 100, you know, developments. So, but I, yeah, I don't know. I, I suspect it's a big opportunity though.

All right. You wanna do one more of these?

Yeah, do more.

Do more. You just, Sean's just like, dance again.

Keep going. Again, put, I put another coin in. I wanna go again.

They're like, well, that's what the beer's for. When you're done, go over there and you'll feel better. It's like, that's the, it's like those restaurants that are like KFC Taco Bell combined in one.

It was like the 7 deadly sins all under one roof.

Yeah. New York, New York City had something like, it was called OTB, off-track betting. Right. And it was like horse races, but there was no, they didn't, they didn't like do the, the throw, they didn't throw the alcohol grenade in there as well. Like it was, you know, New York has standards, right? Like we're not going to allow that. So, so yeah, it was just, just gambling. But I mean, yeah, now it's just like on your phone. So I think like this is a, you know, this is like a mega trend that's going to come out.

I think you're, you're definitely on to something. This is like the inflection is so real. The influx of gambling into sports is like, it happened overnight. It went from never discussed to everything is sponsored or integrated in about, like, if you're watching the NBA playoffs, it says in the third quarter, it's like the line at the start of the game, the current live action line is this. And you know, every player, all the NIL deals, they can do this now. So there's like The floodgates opened as to how much is going to get pushed on people. As somebody who used to gamble a ton, I know that for most people, it's not going to work out. They are not going to beat the house. They're not going to beat the market and they're just going to lose their money. And what I don't understand is, I guess this is like a naive thing of mine, is like the psychology around going to the addiction centers. Because everybody I knew who was in this space of like your gambling starts out fun, then sort of becomes a little bit unhealthy the way it goes. I feel like 0% of those people were going to go voluntarily, like, go to driver's ed. What I thought you were going to say is that you can get the companies— like, unlike the drug industry where, like, there's no corporation that sells heroin, right? That's not the— there's no one person to target. But DraftKings, FanDuel, these companies are going to have a giant target on their back, and they're money printers. And so I thought you were going to say that they will, as a sort of corporate social responsibility, like cover your ass type of thing, they might sponsor or pay for seats in all these different locations, like all these different areas, and then you could provide the service for free for people. I thought that might be where you were going with that. Do you think that's viable or no?

I, you know, I just, I, I'm not too convinced that like a for-profit and, you know, Sam was just talking about these account managers for the whales, right? Like, I think they want to encourage those people to gamble more and like they talk about, you know, if you read their 10-Ks and Qs, like they have an ESG initiative and they do this for people who are, but you know, I, I gotta believe it's like, you know, kind of putting lip service, giving this lip service. Like I just, you know, it, I, I can't believe they would do that. I, you know, I think if I'm DraftKings or FanDuel, the thing I do is I have, if I have a ventures team, I invest in this. And so then, you know, I create the problem and then I also benefit from the cure. So that's the, You know, the kind of the evil genius corporate way of doing it. But yeah, I don't, I don't think they're gonna, they're gonna, you know, drive this on their own.

I have one other question for you. It says, your friend, what, what stuff are you really into right now? Are you like really digging any books, shows, you know, random rabbit holes that you're going down? Is there anything that you're super interested and fascinated by right now?

Yeah, you have the free time.

I'm pretty lasered in on like youth development right now. Right. And education, like that's where I'm spending all my time. So there's a great book called Weapons of Mass Instruction. Uh, and it's basically like, you know, it's an aggre— I've never, it's like a book. It's the only book I describe as aggressive. And it basically like talks about like how schools are totally broken and it's actually by an ex-teacher. So that one's, I thought was really good that I'm, I really like that one. Um, Yeah, that's a big area. And the other area I'm spending a lot of time on is I'm talking to lots of professional sports coaches. So, um, a big part of schooling is motivation. And so I've talked to, I've gotten into like the Texas Rangers and a couple college football team kind of coaching networks. Um, and these guys, they're, yeah, mostly guys. They're amazing. Like I do a 30-minute Zoom with them and I'm like, I wanna run through a wall. After talking to you, right? And I'm trying to figure out if what they do for athletes, you could, you know, could you implant them in a school and could they do that same kind of motivating thing for young people in a different domain?

What's so good? What do they do on the call that's so awesome?

What's the name of that book?

Chasing Perfection. You know, the, the De La Salle football way or something. I think if you read the first half of the book before they start getting into like, you know, what O-line drills they do and stuff, it's really, really good.

Sounds similar to like, uh, The Score Takes Care of Itself.

Is that the Bill Walsh one?

Bill Walsh book. Yeah. So, you know, same thing, super successful football coach. It's a football, it's a sports book, a football book, but it's not at the same time. It's a program building leadership book actually. And it's an entire philosophy of like, focus on the inputs, the outputs will always take care of themselves if you got the inputs right. Yeah. And, um, and how he kind of turned around a losing program into a winning one.

Yeah. I think the other thing he talks about a lot is like subtraction, right? Like, which is like, you know, he's like, a lot of teams want to add new things to, they like want to add new plays. He's like, We have 3 plays on special teams we do, like, that's it, right? And so they really minimized. And like, it's actually like, if you have young kids, you ever seen those Stride bikes?

Yeah.

Right? Like, the brilliance of that is they just subtracted pedals out, right? Like, it's like, and it actually helps kids learn how to ride better. And I don't think people think about subtracting stuff out. They like always want to add. And I actually found like there was a certain genius of how this coach and his team or his coaching staff thought about simplifying a lot and subtracting complexity out. And so yeah, there's— it's like a very profound book on many levels. I, I just think it's like, it's a, it's a really good one. So that's another—

have you read The Talent Code?

No, I'm gonna write that down.

That's a good one for you. Um, in general, you should check out, uh, my college roommate, uh, who's one of my best friends, this guy Trevor Reagan. He has a pretty fascinating story where he was like from a tiny town in Wyoming And when I got to Duke, they were like, your roommate, he's like trying out for the basketball team. So I'm like, sweet. I'm looking out for, you know, a 6'6" Black dude. I'm like, that's going to be my roommate. And instead this 5'8", you know, white kid from Wyoming shows up and I'm like, you're the guy who's trying out for the team? Like, what? How is this going to work? And he was an incredible basketball player. He was like the best basketball player in Wyoming. His dad, both of his parents were teachers and coaches. And he always just thought, okay, I'm going to play sports and then I'll go be a teacher and coach too someday. And what he did was when he went back to Wyoming, he started with a summer camp and he was like, all right, I'm going to teach basketball. And he also, like, he was a manager on the Duke basketball team. Duke basketball team is probably the most prestigious program in college basketball. So he like took what he learned there, but he was like, you know what, what do I wish I had when I, like, what would have made me a better player? Because he, almost made the team. He was the last guy cut. And he kind of sat with him of like, could I have done anything differently? I thought I worked super hard. So could I have worked smarter in any way? Was there anything that in my training protocol would have led me to actually make the team versus being the last final guy who didn't make the cut? Because it killed him to not be on the team. That was his dream. And like, it's like, you don't watch that story. You don't watch the Rudy movie where you, where he doesn't get to play, but that was what happened in his life. And it's like, damn. I didn't even really believe that that was a possible outcome, but it was. And so when he went back, his summer camp, he's teaching, I don't know, 7th grade girls and they would be doing a layup drill, but he put a giant TV screen with a TiVo, like kind of an instant replay of what they were doing. So, cause he's like, one of the things is you never, as a youth player, you never get to see yourself doing anything. Um, like the, or the feedback loop is there's like a huge gap between when you're playing in the gym to when you finally might one day see like some film of you that then, then you'll be told, hey, you should do this differently next time. And then another 3 days goes by before you're back in the gym doing that thing. So instead, he like shortened the feedback loop and he started, and then he went and studied all these coaches. He went and hung out with Pete Carroll. He went and hung out with the best. Like, he would find that the women's Olympic volleyball team in the US dominates. So he went and studied under that coach to be like, how does he run his program? And he was just like, he'd run camps during the summer, which is only 3 months, and then 9 months out of the year, He would just go learn. And I thought it was fascinating. He did that for like, you know, 7 years. So now he has this, uh, he puts out free content that's like in this thing called the Learner's Lab, which is basically, it's like how the science of learning, how do you become a better learner? And he started it with sports, but then he realized like pretty quickly, oh, this applies to everything like business, school, whatever. And he gets brought in by all these sports teams and big companies to give talks to like, how do you actually teach people how to learn better? How do you create an environment? Like basically his theory is almost like if the soil is good, the plants will grow. And like, if you're wondering why your plants aren't growing, have you ever looked at your soil? Maybe your soil is messed up. Like maybe the setup, the culture, the environment that you're, you're setting up here is not going to lead to that type of growth. And so he's put out a bunch of fascinating stuff that I haven't really heard anybody else do. I, you should check it out. One of the genius things he did was like Huberman, he went and read all the white papers about learning and motor development and all this stuff.. And then he's like, dude, this is gold. It's just buried in an old scientific white paper that was made by an old white scientist who doesn't know anything about social media or how to get the message out there. So he would go read all these and then he would turn it into like an animated video and put it up on YouTube. And these videos that seem so niche can get like a million views because it's actually interesting content, but it was just stuck in science world, which was not like applicable to where most people go look for information or entertainment.

Yeah, I should check out Trevor's stuff. Like, he sounds like he's doing sort of God's work there, which is awesome. But yeah, there's a ton of like amazing research about youth development, education, learning that like people just ignore. Like, it's like proven stuff that says, you know, if you want a young person to like learn something, you should quiz them daily. Like, it's shown to work. But like, if you talked— I've talked to probably 70 or 80 teachers, not a single one can— does it. And part of it is like, it's logistically very challenging. So I understand that. But But there's so many things at work and like we still treat education very artisanally, right? It's like, you know, it's like everybody's an artist. Like, oh, Sam likes teaching history this way and Sean likes teaching it this way and Anand likes teaching it this way. It's like, hey, just go and like do like improv, you know? And instead of being like, oh, what Sam does works, like Sean and Anand, like follow the script because like the kids love it and like it works and you can color outside the lines a little bit, but you can't like go rogue and just come up with your own thing. So yeah, I think I'll check, I'll check that out. But yeah, there's a ton of like really smart people who've dug into this. We just, for whatever reason, we just seem to ignore it.

In that Mohnish Pabrai interview we just did, he said something. He's like the, like the something like the neurons in the brain. And normally I'm like, you're an investor. What do you know about the neurons in the brain? But I was at his house and like one whole wall was all just science books. It's like, there's like an investing book section. There's a huge section of just science books, either psychology or biology or physics, whatever it was. And he was just telling me about all these different books he was reading and what he liked in each one. And one of the things he was saying was between the ages of, I forgot what he said, like 10 to 19 or something like that, like 80, 90% of the neural connections formed during that time. And it's basically the peak time to specialize. And he's like, if you look at all the great ones, whether it's like, you know, the great musicians, Whether it's Warren Buffett, you know, buying his first stock at age 10. It's like the great ones at every field during that key golden period, they begin to like really go deep on an area and become great at that. And not everybody should specialize, but the people who really want to become the outliers and do great, like that is the golden era. And I'm sitting there, I'm like, oh, I guess, uh, I guess I missed the boat. Like, I don't know what I was doing during that time, but it wasn't that. And he's like, well, you always got your kids, you know, to try.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, you know, I spent 8 years in Spanish. And like, I can say, me llamo Anand, puedo ir al baño, which is like, my name's Anand, where's the bathroom, right? And so like, that's a waste of time for everybody involved, right?

And instead, like— Dude, I took Spanish for 3 years. I just— no hablo. That's all I got.

You got it.

Strong H in that hablo.

Yeah. You don't even say what you don't speak. You're just like, I don't speak. Yeah. Yeah. So we got your neurons working on that, which is, you know, so I think like there's a lot of like, yeah, wasted potential, wasted time here. And yeah, that neurons thing, the thing you said about, you know, if somebody has a lemonade stand early in life, like that's a great sort of indicator. Like, yeah, I gotta believe that's certainly like a sign of somebody who's formidable that is, you know, could do great things. Uh, and so, yeah, I think we got to tap into that a lot more.

Um, thanks for doing this, dude. Round 2. Done.

All right, cool. Yeah, well, do you want people to follow you anywhere or get more of you on any, uh, any platform?

Uh, yeah, A. Sonwal on Twitter, or, uh, my name on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn Voice or something, so, you know, I don't mean to brag, but that's, uh, that's my thing.

So yeah, I don't think that's a brag.

It is, it is for the record. That is a full-on brag right there.

I'm pretty— I'm big on LinkedIn, is actually Yeah, I framed it.

I framed my thing. It's in our bedroom.

Do you make your wife look at that before we go to bed?

I'm like, you realize the prize that you got. Yeah, it's a big thing. Whenever we get in a fight, I'm like, let's go into the room and look at the LinkedIn influencer thing I got.

You play the cards you're dealt, I suppose. All right, this has been fun, man.

All right, man, thanks.

Alright, see you.

I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.