You Don’t Need A Mentor -> Focus On THIS Instead

All right, Sam, I want to do a short episode that is about one specific topic, believers. So a lot of founders I know are interested in getting investors, getting advisors. I'm sure you get hit up a lot in your email for either, hey, will you invest in this? Will you advise in this? So I think everybody needs somebody in their career, usually in your early 20s, that believes in you more than you believe in yourself at the time. They just have an irrational belief. You're a penny stock, but they see you as a blue chip and they want to buy up all your stock. And they do that by spending time with you, by spending effort with you, sometimes investing in you, sometimes advising you, but it's not the advice, it's not the money, That actually now in hindsight, when you look back, is what mattered. The thing that really mattered was this person believed in you more than you believed in yourself at the time. And that they were, um, they almost trick you into believing in yourself or to just going forward and overcoming that initial like hesitation or doubts to just get going to where finally your evidence will start to catch up. And eventually you're fueled by your evidence and you're fueled by, you know, your, your own self-belief. But. It's like jumping, jump-starting a car. There's people in your life who do that. I've never talked to you about this. I know a couple of people in my life that did this. I want to hear, did you have this?

I had this with a couple people. First of all, my wife. I felt like she was like doing the same thing when I met her. She was like picking stocks and she picked a good one, I hope. Yeah, I had two. The first one was Scott Belsky. So Scott Belsky currently is the chief product officer of Adobe, soon to be CEO, I think. And he's probably a billionaire because he has started and sold a bunch of companies. And I cold emailed him when I first started my company, The Hustle, asking him to invest. And he said no. And then about 6 or 8 weeks later, I, uh, he was on our daily email and I got an email from him in particular when I was having a horrible day. And he goes, these emails are just so good. I have to join. And he gave me like $15,000 or something like that. And I only met with Scott in person one time. And like, because Scott has always been, he was a big deal back then. He's an even bigger deal now. And he had one meeting with me where he taught me, I had never heard the word steward. You know, steward, like you are a steward of this capital. You are a steward of the brand. And he gave me this pump-up talk and he's like, you are so like, I could tell you are going to be a steward of the hustle and a steward of my money and anyone else's money, your customers. You have this. And, and I remember thinking, It changed my life. The fact that Scott fucking Belsky believed in me and he used this word steward. I was so into it. The second person was Tim Ferriss. So I have told this story before, but basically I met Tim Ferriss because he lived near me in San Francisco and we would walk our dogs at the same time and just talk about neighborhood stuff. Well, a few weeks after we first started talking, I get an email from Tim saying, hey, I know what The Hustle is. It looks really cool. Could we meet and get dinner? And I can ask you a little bit about email because I want to start a newsletter. And I was like, yeah, sure, let's do it, man. And so we go out to dinner and in our neighborhood and I get down to sit at dinner and he goes, oh, you are the dog owners guy. Like you are the same guy. And I was like, yeah, man, what's going on? Because I never told him what I did for work when we would walk our dogs together. Cause I wanted him to think, I didn't want to bother him cause he was like a celebrity to me and I didn't want to ruin that relationship. And it was awesome. The fact that this guy like wanted to meet with me and I, he was like, what you guys are doing is so smart, so innovative. And I was like, it's not that interesting. He's like, no, it is. And he like bought into me and he believed in me. And that was such a big deal to me that he gave me the time of day, just even just a dinner. It was like game-changing where I was like, I'm the man, I'm the man, I'm the best. Like there is no one better than me. And I had that like energy because of those two meetings.

It planted a seed because then I would look at Scott and Tim's other endeavors. You know, they did some amazing stuff and it felt good. You know how when you go to a website and you see someone who puts your logo on their website to brag that they use you? You go to like hubspot.com and like Nike, it says like Nike uses, and I felt so much, I felt so much gratitude that I was one of the logos on their websites. Do you know what I mean? And I remember like thinking that I'm like, look, like this person picks a bunch of winners and I happen to be part of this basket. I feel honored. And so I would use that for a long time of like, go to his Crunchbase profile. He lists The Hustle as an investment. I remember thinking like I was so special and I used that for fuel for a long time.

And she was just clickbaiting us. Like it was a personal finance and entrepreneurship class, but getting rich sounds a lot better. And she was a woman who, she had a crazy story. She graduated from Duke with a degree in Mandarin because that's what she was interested in. She just followed what she was interested in. And she remembers, she told us, she's like, I remember at the time feeling completely clueless what the hell I'm supposed to do with my life because all my friends were going to law school, banking, whatever. I didn't want to do those, but it just felt like School was just giant, like pipe. They'll just dump you out in New York or LA or San Francisco in one of these tracks. And I wasn't on one of the tracks and I felt bad about myself. And I realized like, you know, people are like, what the hell are you going to do with this Mandarin degree? And they're like, good luck with that. And she's like, I bet I can figure something out in China. And so she just moves to China, one-way ticket, ends up building a great business there, connecting Chinese companies with American companies because she spoke both languages. Anyway, she got super rich in the process. Uh, retires by 30, comes back to Duke to teach. And so the reason she bet on me or believed in me early was she was not an investor. She really wasn't even an advisor. She was a believer. We had this terrible idea to start a sushi restaurant chain. We were like, why isn't there a Chipotle for sushi? And we were like, we'll do it. Even though we had no restaurant experience, no sushi experience, no nothing. And everybody I talked to, every adult, every grownup that I looked up to was basically like restaurants. Equal fail. Doing a startup versus going to med school. Like, I don't know, man. Like, are you sure? Like, you just, you just gotta, you just got it, got accepted in. Like, you should just go. And she was the only one who was like, this sounds awesome. You guys should totally do this. You could totally do this. And at the time I took that as she believes in our idea. We have a good idea. And I wish I could say that she believed in us, but she didn't even really know us that well. She was actually just such a big believer that like, If you just do the most interesting thing and like the most exciting thing and ambitious thing for you in your life at the moment, shit works out. She was just a believer in the path more than even us. But at the time I interpreted it as she thinks we can, we're going to win. She thinks this is a good idea and that this is going to work. And so even false belief will work. It'll fuel your engine for a while.

Not only false belief, but just her one conversation with you, which she does not remember. And at the time she was like, what I'm saying is not important. This is no big deal. And conversations like that make such a big impact every once in a while.

You know what I mean? It's like when your kid draws something and then they show it to you and it looks horrible, but you're like, this is awesome. Oh my God. Did you, how did you think of this? Or like, whatever. Like, are those two colors? Does that because of this? And you make them feel like they're a fucking artist. She did that for me, except I was 18 years old. I was 22 years old or something, 21 years old. And she looked at my shitty business plan and she was like, that's awesome. You could totally do this. And I, it fueled me. And so Lisa Kieser was the first one. And she, it was genuine, by the way, there was no like BS in it. I think she genuinely had that level of enthusiasm and excitement about it. And it was contagious. It cannot be faked when somebody's genuinely excited for you. The second person was this guy named John Prendergrass. So we got into some accelerator. You're supposed to get assigned with a mentor, which is like the most fake way you can get a mentor is like it gets assigned to you. And this guy put in a request. He goes, I want these guys. And it was because he himself, although now he was doing some fintech company, his first business was he was a franchisee of Boston Market. And he was like, oh, these guys are doing a restaurant thing. I can help them out. And he helped us out in two ways. The first was he gave us real talk. So he took us into the, we came to his office and he was like, So what's the plan? And we told him the whole business plan. We gave him the pitch. We had practiced a million times. Then he goes, is this shit going to work or not? And just him asking us that way, like jarred me. And I was like, I have no idea, which is like not what you're supposed to say when you're pitching or investors or employees or anybody really supposed to just say, of course it's going to work. Here's the research. Here's the studies. Here's why. Here's the plan. I was like, dude, I have no idea. And he goes, so you probably shouldn't sign a lease for the 10, you know, a personal guarantee and a 10-year lease, right? If you don't know if this concept's going to work. He's like, yo, so how can you figure out if the concept's gonna work? He just asked a better question. Like instead of where should we launch, like what, what, what location should we go for? He's like, how do you figure out if this is even worth doing? If people want this? And he got us thinking, he got us to eventually do like a cloud kitchen. And so he helped us that way. But the thing he did afterwards was much more valuable after we, so he, he talked to us for about an hour and you know, the bad news was we were dumb. The good news is we knew we were dumb. Whereas there was a lot of 21-year-olds who are dumb, but they think they're smart. We had the one asset, which was we thought we were pretty dumb. And so when somebody told us a good idea or somebody seemed smarter than us, we actually like took them up on it. And so he told us to do these 3 things or think about these 3 things. So we just immediately went and did those 3 things. And then 4 days later, we were like, hey, John, we did those 4 things. Here's what we learned. Here's what we're going to do next. And so he was like, these guys are great, which is now that I'm in the position where sometimes I give people advice. That never happens. Like, it seemed like the obvious thing to do, but actually that rarely ever happens. Rarely do people ask a question, genuinely want the answer, then take it, take good advice and act on it and come back and say, here's what happened. They closed the loop and say, here's what happened. Here's what we're going to do next. And so he wrote this blog post and what he said in the blog post, I don't believe was true at all at the time, but dude, that was like a gust of wind in our sails. He goes, he goes, I met these founders and I've met a lot of founders, probably 100 founders, and I've given a lot of advice. He goes, these guys, they took what I said, they acted on it immediately, violently. And he goes, one of the most important things for an entrepreneur is a high bias for action. He goes, and these guys, he named us, and he goes, they have the highest bias for action of anyone I've met in the last 10 years. I didn't even know that phrase. It's kind of like you're talking about steward. Like I hadn't even heard bias for action. That was not a phrase I'd ever heard. But I was like, fucking put that label on my back. That's me now. I was a blank canvas before that. I was an empty vessel. And him giving me that label became kind of like calling cards. Like, yo, I don't know what the right answer is, but I know that how I do things is I have a high bias for action. So I'm just going to take a shit ton of action and I'll figure things out that way. And so he gave us like a real gift in that moment, which was again, not really true, but it didn't matter. It was like true in my mind, and therefore he gave me something to strive towards, which reminds me of your, your Belsky story.

Yeah, exactly. So he is, so that was the second one. And then the third one is Michael Birch. Michael Birch. He was the guy who was what I wanted to be. He was a Silicon Valley billionaire, built multiple successful companies, was living the life, had a cool office in San Francisco. And I came, I moved to San Francisco to work with him. And so I worked with him and eventually he ended up promoting me. He was the CEO at the time. I was the junior guy in the company. I was 24 years old, probably youngest guy in the company. And he actually promoted me to CEO, which was insane. This is, you know, like an 18-person company at the time. And it wasn't that he promoted me, it was the speech he gave. He goes, he took me offsite and I thought I was getting fired because that's what I had seen in movies is they take you like out to coffee because they want to like shoot you in the head out there and not cause a scene in the office. So I texted my mom. I was like, oh no, he wants to meet offsite. Like I'll be home for lunch. You know, it's over. I had a good run. It was fun. But like, yeah, whatever I was doing there, making it up as I went, I did something wrong. He sat me down and it was him and his wife and he goes, you know, when you meet somebody, sometimes you just know. And I think he's talking about his wife. And he goes, I met a lot of people in Silicon Valley. I know now when somebody's special and they're going to do something special in their career. He goes, you're either going to do it here or elsewhere. So I'm going to give you the keys to have you do it here. And I was blown away. You know, it was like an astrology reading. Like it didn't mean anything. There was no evidence. There was no logic. There was no explanation, no rationale, but him just saying, uh, you know, you're going to do something special. Yeah. That fucking fueled me. I, I, I then like failed for like 6 years straight right after that. Um, which felt horrible because this guy believed in me and I just felt like I couldn't deliver this, like, you know, billion-dollar company that I was supposed to. But that fueled me for a very long time.

Can I just tell you one of the funnier things that I've seen this week? So on Sean's— this looks like Sean is like a year out of college, or he's 24 years old. On your website, which I assume is your resume, basically you have your height and weight listed. So it says, Sean Perry, 24 years old, 6 foot, 165, 167 pounds of pure hustle.

Yeah.

Be a believer for somebody, and if somebody believes in you, it's a good reminder today to hit them up and thank them for it. That's a, that's, that's the takeaway here.