#69 - Paid News, Burning Money & Solving Climate Change

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What up, Sam? How are you doing? Hi. You got a sweatshirt on that says it's only money. What are you trying to say?

I'm trying to say that, um, when I look at my portfolio and look at my losses, it's only money.

It's only money. Uh, you know, I met this guy once and he was like— he— I don't know, doesn't matter. Uh, met a guy and we were talking, and I'm easily excitable. So if you start talking to me and you start talking a little bit of sense, I get really excited and I will triple down and make some kind of commitment that I don't want to make. But I did that with this guy where he was— we were both talking about money and we were like, you know what, fuck money, right? Like, we need to fuck money. And we agreed to do a money burn in San Francisco. We were like, okay, $1,000. You bring $1,000 and we're just going to burn it.

And that's so stupid.

And of course, exactly.

And does money burn?

Yes. Paper, right?

It's not paper. It's cotton. What? Yeah. So there's a— it's like a riddle. What weighs more? All the money printed in a year or all the trains that have ever passed through Grand Central Station? And the answer is the money. They weigh the same, which is they're both weightless because trains don't pass through Grand Central Station and money isn't made from paper.

Ah, okay, good. I love riddles. Um, thank you for that.

So yeah, cotton. So in fact, it does grow on trees, but I'm pretty sure money burns.

I think I've seen this in movies unless they're using fake fake paper there. But anyways, we didn't end up doing it because I pushed out because I was like, do I really want to burn $1,000? I don't think I do. And also I was like, this is gonna get so much blowback and no one's gonna care about the intentions behind it. It's just gonna come across as a douchey thing to do. So I didn't do it. So I'm sorry to my friend, I backed out of it. But I do like the idea of sort of letting go of the attachment to money. But anyhow, yeah, it's only money.

It's only money, and I paid $50 for this hoodie. $80 or something. I bought it because, uh, Dave Portnoy— have you seen what he's done?

Uh, what do you mean?

his plan is going according to plan, I think.

I love it. Uh, it is. He's losing a lot of money. Um, you want to get into this?

Yeah, let's do it.

Okay, I think I have 2 or 3 interesting things. Um, have you read what I wrote?

I've— I'm looking at it right now. So are we talking— okay, we talk about 3 things on this podcast, right? Ideas, so like kind of You know, interesting ideas based off of trends, observations, et cetera. We talk about people that are doing interesting things or living interesting lives. And then the last one is that we talk about, you know, just cool stuff we saw or stuff we're trying ourselves. And so which one, this first one, which one is this?

One, I have, I have number 1 and I have number 2. Okay. So the, the, there's 2 of them. The first is let's do The Japanese one. Okay. So one of my favorite things to do, and it's kind of a nerdy thing, is I love looking at, and I've told you this, I love looking at what other countries do and figuring out why it's interesting and why we don't have it in America or the other way around. Okay. Um, and the, the Japanese and Chinese cultures, which I know close to nothing about. Um, I don't entirely understand if they have anything in common. Like, I don't know if like the similarities between Japan and China is the same as America to China. Like, so I don't know. But what I've noticed that both the Chinese and the Japanese are wonderful at monetizing news apps. And one, there's a few reasons. The first reason is in Japan, I don't know if this is true in China, but in Japan it's still quite common to buy newspapers and to subscribe to news. That's still common. Um, in China, I don't know why it's so much popular, but for example, in China the, uh, people who have podcasts like this, they monetize significantly better with subscriptions. So like, there's like, for example, Serial was one of the most popular podcasts whenever it came out. It had I think 56 million listens or something crazy like that, and it only made like a million dollars in ad revenue. It was shit. Whereas, um, multiple, uh, creators in China will make $5-10 million a year and with significantly smaller audience. So anyway, I'm— I got really interested in these businesses, and the, the one that I think is most interesting is called Userbase. Have I ever told you about Userbase? Nope. Okay, so the only way you will likely know about them is because they bought Quartz in 2018 for about $100 million. So the interesting thing about Userbase is they're public in China, so I could— I went and found a lot of the reports, which I love doing, and I looked at their decks and I also learned all about them.

So long story, right?

Tell me, tell me why I care about this. Tell me about these apps.

I will. Have you heard of NewsPix?

I have not heard of it.

Yep.

You know, I think one way to think about this is who, who is successfully replicating that model here, right? So you have The Athletic, which has built a pretty large, um, revenue business off of subscriptions. And then I think one of the legacy, I don't know, New York Times or whoever is doing really well, right? Isn't, isn't that the case? The New York Times or Wall Street Journal, one of them is like doing well.

No, these aren't the same. These aren't the same because Userbase isn't a publisher. It's an aggregator. Sure.

Which is a wonderful company. Which is more like, more like Flipboard.

Yeah. Which is wonderful. Cause you don't need a significant amount of people and the market size is like everyone in the country.

I've heard of it, but I've never gone.

Okay. So it's like political. Yeah. It's, it's, it's his name, Matt Drudge. I could be saying it wrong. Drudge. It's a hard word to say. Um, it's just like one guy and he's just like pretty right-winged guy.

And I went to the website just now and I was like, oh, I must've typed it in wrong. Cause the website looks like, you know, oh, it's Craigslist garbage, dude.

That website gets a billion. Views a month.

That's because— is this conspiracies? Is that what this is?

Uh, I would say it depends who you ask. I don't think it's conspiracy, but it is for— it's for sure biased and right-winged, just like, like, um, the founder of HuffPo.

This literally gets a billion. Are you joking? Or is it literally—

I swear to God, like, literally 1 billion. It could have declined recently, dude. Fuckin'— do you know Drudge was the one who broke the story about the Clinton, um, uh, when he slept with Monica Lewinsky? Like, he called it.

Oh wow.

So anyway, he— it's really just an aggregator of other links, and every once in a while he'll do something original.

And does he retitle the headlines, or—

Yeah, dude, it's just— it's literally just a page that you click off. And every once in a while he does stuff. Yes, that page was designed in 1996 and it's never changed. It doesn't even—

if you haven't gone to this, go to it right now. DrudgeReport.com. This is so weird. This doesn't even— like, literally, there's like—

or if you go to Drudge.com, I think there's like 20 links that are—

it's a black and white page, 20 black links, and then there's just a giant picture of an astronaut because it's like related to one story with a huge headline. And then there's again 1,000 links below that.

According— yeah, a report was done in like '90, uh, in like— okay, so according to SimilarWeb, It gets close to 100 million unique visitors. So 10 page views a month. Yeah, probably a billion. It's very influential, this site. And it's interesting. And I think that if you just like paywall this, he would crush it.

So who's this guy, Matt Drudge? What's his story?

He's a former journalist. He, he's just a guy. I don't know. He's just a, he's just a guy who created a cult following and people love it. And when Ken Lear started HuffPo, he said, I'm going to make the left-wing version of of Drudge Report. And so if you go to this website, it does a really good job of big, bold headlines. That's like yellow journalism that was invented by Hearst in the—

What does that mean? Yellow journalism?

Basically, this has been around forever. People think clickbait is new. It ain't. Hearst was a pioneer of this. So he would have these huge headlines and it would, it would always, it was always mostly about like blood and scandal. And, you know, if it bleeds, it leads type of thing. And then Rupert Murdoch also did it with his newspapers, and that's how they got popular. So if you go to HuffPo.com, it's, it's very similar to this. It's a huge headline right in your face. And that kind of what that does is in your brain is it triggers a little bit of addictiveness. Business Insider is just like this too. If you go to Business Insider, big ass headlines.

So they put their stats on the site. It says visits to Drudge today, 34 million in the past 24 hours, 1.1 billion in the past month. $10 billion in the past year.

And he monetizes anything. He has any ads or what does he do?

Um, so he monetizes it with a couple ads and I knew guys who were the ad sellers. Like he uses a third party, so it probably has Google. Google AdSense and things like that in there. But he also uses like some, like a third-party direct seller, like a company that sells ads on it. And they said that it was like the best, the best, like the biggest site ever for ads.

So I'm gonna— or you hit reply to their marketing emails and there's typically a marketing manager on the other end who will tell you the answer, right? Um, so anyway, is this not like fucking fascinating? It is.

And, uh, maybe I'm just an idiot and everybody out there is like, dude, of course I know Drudge, I'm one of the 10 billion visitors.

But no, young people don't know this.

I've literally— I've heard the name, I never even looked at it.

Alan and UpRighty, have you heard of this?

Yeah, give us an F in the chat if you know it. If you don't know it, give us something else. Oh, okay, he knows. He doesn't know it now because we're talking about it. All right, one said yes, one said no. He says y'all sheltered. Uh, nice. Okay, good, good comedy.

Super interesting shit, man. And, um, so why doesn't The Hustle have more visitors, dude?

Look at this guy. This guy's, you know, killing it.

Well, a few reasons. One, it was definitely easier to build a cult following in 1998 when he launched— or sorry, he launched in— I don't know when he launched. It could have been '98. I mean, it's like, why doesn't Letgo beat Craigslist? It's like, well, because Craigslist has been around since '96 and they just gained market share real fast.

Dude, there's a part of me that wants to just like create some alter ego that just does some Sean Hannity, Milo Yiannopoulos style character that just says outlandish shit. I just want to see, could I do it? Could I? Could I, you know, um, the answer is yes, by the way, market my way to the top through—

the answer is yes. I, one of our friends did this and he got a lot of traffic and then he, uh, canceled it and, uh, like he like ended the site because he's like, I just can't do this. This is sucking my soul. But it worked really well.

Got it.

Okay. Typically, and by the way, typically conservative websites get way more page views and traffic than non-conservative sites.

Yeah. This is now a conservative podcast, just so you know. We don't talk about politics, but if that helps the downloads go up, conservative and we appreciate your support.

So my point in all this was I think news apps actually, if you charge money and you offer a similar offering as free ones, you can do, uh, it's like you can actually make way more money than, uh, not.

And to your thing earlier, um, so this also happens in China, like you said. So I think, I don't know how you say the name exactly, but it's like Toutiao or something like that. It's the, so ByteDance, which owns TikTok, Yep, that's another one example of—

that's just like Userbase in Japan.

Yeah, they own— it's T-O-U-T-I-A-O. I don't know how you say it, but, and it's the same thing. It's this giant news app with like 20 million DAU or whatever. I don't know, it's like some like— like it's like very big for a news app, right? Like there's not— the US doesn't have, I don't feel like, news apps that are doing those types of numbers. Actually, I'm gonna look up there.

I think it— and I think it went public for like $20 billion.

Um, so okay, I was way under. DAU, $700 million. MAU, $1.5 billion. I knew I was under because I said $20 million DAU, and that's not that much. $700 million DAU, which is just insane. Um, so yeah, and they bought TikTok for kicks and giggles. What?

Yeah, and I think that they spun that news app, um, they spun that news app off. So opportunity here is I think that news apps in America are way, way, way under-monetized. And right now, we are— the demand in news is crazy high with Trump being elected. Everyone experienced what was called the Trump bump, which, uh, right, which—

and what, doesn't Trump have his own news network, or what is this thing that he promotes? This, uh, oh, oh, have you seen this thing? This news network he promotes instead of Fox now?

No, what is it?

He has this, um, So, so somebody back in the day had said like one of the sort of one theory was that the reason he wanted to run was because—

yeah, I thought that was a rumor.

Yeah, that was a rumor. But he promotes this thing instead of, um, Fox News. I have to find it. It's like O-something. It starts with an O. It's a 4-letter domain for the news, and he like promotes this as like, yeah, this is the good news or whatever. I never heard of this network before. It's probably one of those right-wing news networks that's like massive and I've never heard of it and no, nobody in my Twitter timeline talks about it. So I just never see it.

But there's a lot of, a lot of people have tried this. It really hasn't worked that well. Ashton Kutcher did it with, it's called A+, I believe it's called. And A+, it's, it's something involving his initials. A+K, is that what it is? Yeah. And they, and they got to like 40 or 50 million monthly uniques, but then like Facebook and Twitter said, all right, we're gonna— if you post links, we're actually not gonna show you to a lot of users. And so it basically crashed. Lil Wayne tried to do the same thing. And then that— this is actually how BJPen.com, which is something you and I probably both read, started.

Yeah, so Alan just posted in the chat, so it's called One America News Network, OAN. And I've seen Trump posting about this. I never heard of this before. Had you ever heard of this thing?

No, but it looks like, uh, it's owned by a larger company.

100 to 250 employees. Yeah, I don't know who owns this thing, but anyways, there's something there to dig into. But okay, news apps, we like it. Um, I'm personally more interested in this like Drudge thing than the Japanese aggregators, uh, because the Drudge thing blew my mind.

But it's the same, it's, it's the same thing. This is my point. It's quite similar, right?

Um, okay, cool. What else you got?

You want to talk about neilpatel.com?

Okay, let's do it. So Neil Patel's this marketer guy, right?

You mean the enterprise contracts where they say, okay, yeah, you know, there's a services, a professional services component to it.

Yes. And so a lot of people, including myself, cuz I'm not in enterprise software, don't know this, but like at, at Atlassian, which is a large company, half the revenue is from maintenance and service.

Yeah.

There's that crazy.

It's crazy. AWS does this too. You, you spend whatever, $30 grand a month and they're like, oh, you need priority support. You need enterprise support just in case, you know, you have, you have a good business, so you don't wanna ruin this. And so you're paying $5K a month, $6K a month. And just, uh, just to have the ability to ask questions, if you need to ask questions, it's mind-boggling.

And so what Neil appears he has done is he goes, Yeah, like we're not actually gonna sell the software because maybe one day we'll build something. We're actually only gonna like, but we're gonna like kind of run it a little bit like a software company, but we're gonna make all of our money from that, those service, that service fee. And so they do a little bit of work, but in reality they actually have software on the backend.

But they're doing SEO work. So he's not selling leads, he's actually doing the SEO work.

Yes. But the interest, but why this is interesting to me is If you look at, like, I just, maybe this is not interesting to people who know what they're talking about, but I didn't. And I was like, wait, most of the margin is in the maintenance revenue. And so that's like where they're making all of their cash. This could, it's a consultancy. And that's super interesting. And it got me wondering like, man, if you just sell like relatively cheap software and a lot of the software's not hard to get and you just add on a layer of service and maintenance, it's like, holy fuck, that's the way you do it. All right. This episode is brought to you by SuperSight. So here's the deal. I'm incredibly impatient, like horribly impatient. I get an idea at midnight and at 8 a.m. the next day I want it done. And unfortunately, hiring people to get that stuff done is really time-consuming. It takes forever. So supersight.com, here's what it does. You go to supersight.com, they already have a team of designers ready to go. You tell them what you want and they get it done. It's 20 times faster than traditional hiring and 50% more affordable than agencies. If you need something designed and need it done well and fast, Try them out, superside.com. I've used them before, love them.

Yeah, that's one way I first heard this because there's this guy on Twitter, I think I've shouted him out before. Um, I grabbed dinner with this guy once, but his name's, uh, Chetan. Chetan P is his, uh, his Twitter. So C-H-E-T-A-N-P, I think something like that. And he's a, he's an investor at Benchmark, which is probably, you know, one of the top 5 venture funds in, in the country. And, um, He does enterprise. He specializes in enterprise. He just made the Midas List, which is like the, you know, VC, like, whatever, 30 for 30 or 30 Under 30 list, basically. And so anyways, he tweets out these little summaries about enterprise companies where it's like 7 bullet points and you understand how this company makes their money and how fast they're growing.

And like, oh yeah, what he highlights— only 30?

No, no, I'm saying the Midas List is like a bullshit list, like the Forbes 30 Under 30.

Oh, oh.

But anyways, he, he often posts these like, hey, counterintuitive. People think it's all about software. Look how much more— look how much of their contribution comes from services. Hey, you know, everybody thinks you should be adopted bottoms up. Look at this company, they do the complete opposite. So he's very good at pointing out the like many ways to win. And, uh, that goes against sort of the conventional Silicon Valley wisdom, which is like— Silicon Valley wisdom is like, oh, technology gets adopted bottoms up now, you don't have to sell. You know, you sell in later.

No, that's bullshit. Look at Oracle.

It should be a software play. You don't want to have, you know, this heavy OpEx component. And it's like, you know, and so he just walks through a bunch of different examples of companies that are doing it very differently, like Pivotal and other companies like that.

By the way, I bet most are doing it that way. Even if you look at Slack, they've got a fucking sales team.

Yeah, of course they have a sales team, but like, you know, they're, they're the example where it's like they grew like crazy from this bottoms-up thing and then they hired a sales team, but like Many companies do the exact opposite and succeed.

I don't think that that's true. I bet if you learn about Slack, I bet you most of the revenue came from sales team people.

Uh, I don't think so early on. I mean, they didn't have any salespeople early on, so it couldn't have been that way, right? But I think the revenue then pales in comparison to where they are now. So yeah, whatever, who cares? Okay, so this Neil Patel guy, you think he's interesting because what? Because, okay, so you, you thought the interesting part was that Surprise, surprise, these software companies actually have a significant amount of money that's coming from this client services. That's interesting. Is there anything else about this Neil Patel guy that you think is interesting or that could be sort of replicated in some way?

No.

Okay, cool. Well, you know, shout out to the Indian.

I'll take the under, but okay.

Dude, I'm almost positive.

Like, Neil, clear the air. Neil, you hear this? Clear the air. So Neil's, I think he's cousins with this guy, Hiten Shah. I think that's why they started Kissmetrics together.

Yeah, they're cousins. I bet you that he's probably done— anyway, I bet it's quite large. And anyway, the way that he did this was he created Quick Sprout and then he looked at what sold well and just launched it. And there's two companies that have done this really well. The first is WP— I mean, there's probably a ton. The first one that I can name is WPBeginner. It's wpbeginner.com. It just blogs about interesting WordPress stuff. His name's Syed. I bet you Syed— I bet. And so what he did was he looked at which WordPress plugins did best and then he just launched his own and then put his links in there. And I bet, I bet you he's got a little empire that does $40 million in recurring revenue. I've talked to like people who claim they know and it's around, it's like in that ballpark. And then the second one who's, who did the same strategy, which I am emulating is SoftBank. You know, SoftBank started this way. Yep.

That's right.

The news or sorry, information, then conferences, then Yeah, so they just started a magazine and they looked at which ads did best, and then they started or invested in those companies.

I like it. Um, okay, cool.

So interesting to me.

I got a couple topics for you. Um, tell me if these are interesting. So, um, there's this thing called— your mouse is hovering on this, I'm going to talk about it. It's called Book a YC Team. Uh, so what this is, is there's two guys who were in the YC batch and they weren't able to raise money, their startup didn't work out, and so they created this website called Book a YC Team. It's like, hey, you want to hire like a product and engineer from YC? Like, two founders, we're badass, we got into YC, that's like Harvard. You can just hire us and we'll just be like a little two-man demolition crew for you for some price for some period of time. And so it's like the—

it's just an agency.

Uh, amazing. I want to— well, our team joiners— I want to sign up for this. My, my concern is that if they're from YC, I'm just gonna be a hater. If they're from YC, it means that they're soft and care about the wrong stuff and don't move fast and they're just weak. But great idea. I like it.

Okay. I don't agree with that at all, but all right. Neither of us would really know. That's just like funny.

Okay. Dude, I just, my point is just like Silicon, a lot of Silicon Valley people who make shit, they just launch slow. They do all this user testing versus just like fucking do it.

This is my point. And so this whole like YC book a team thing, they could— it could be cool because those people are generally very smart and a lot of their design's great. But like if they're like Soft and Madonnas, then—

well, I think what will happen is these are the YC teams that have gone through it and failed. And, um, you know, by then they are, are at a very different, like, I don't think they're soft. I think they are, uh, you know, hardened by the opportunity, by, by, by the experience. And, uh, I would bet that they are some of the best talent you can pick up at that point in time.

So I like this. I think this is cool. If I were these guys, I would not raise any money and this would, I would just make just fuck loads of cash off this.

Yeah, exactly. I agree. You're just farming the YC talent pipeline.

Okay, so start an agency just for YC companies. Be like, guys, we'll build this shit for you, right? Exactly.

Love this. Okay, so another cool thing. Okay, so this one's super quick. I just— I don't even know why I wrote this down. So there's this company called Remote, remote.com.

Yeah, they just raised a lot of money.

Yeah, there's raised $11 million, I think. And they, they're doing something really smart, which is if you've ever tried to expand internationally, one of the biggest pain points is starting your own entity in the region. So like, we have this problem at Twitch all the time. It's like, hey, we're interested in this country. It takes like a year to spin up a legal entity in the country. Now you have to maintain that. There's a whole bunch of cost, a whole bunch of red tape, and you need it to be able to do— like, some countries you need it to operate, some countries you need it to be able to do ad sales, for example, in that region. So there's all these reasons why you need a local entity, but having a local entity is really hard. And so, uh, to employ people and whatnot. So what Remote's doing is they're doing the hard work of opening up legal entities everywhere And then they are figuring out ways for you to use that entity to hire your remote staff as employees on the ground in that country.

Okay. Let's rip, let's rip on that. Cause I have a few cool insights. The first, well, this is everyone probably has this, you know, it's still hard to hire state over, like over state line, like state to state. It's hard. And I've got, I've had to pay hundreds of dollars in penalties because I didn't, I wasn't, I have people now who handle this, but when I first started, I handled it. You have to like keep track of like all your licenses for Texas. And like I had one remote employee in Washington, I had to like register there and shit and I just didn't do it and I didn't do it the right way. I had to pay hundreds of dollars in fees for penalties. It's quite hard to do that state to state. Have you done that? Have you hired?

I've hired across states and I'm like most people where you don't even realize there's other shit you need to think about.

And right. I didn't know until I got like a letter from the leader. Yeah, I just got like, and then I'm like, where do I organize all this. So yeah, that's interesting. Another thing that's kind of cool is I wonder if— so there's a whole bunch of companies or industries where you have to have a license to practice, but if you only have one person who works at your company who's licensed, then you're okay. So for example, if you sell health insurance, if you sell like— so if you sell any type of benefits, you have to be— I believe you have to be a broker. If you want to sell certain types of real estate, you have to have a broker's license. And oftentimes getting those licenses in every state can be challenging. So for example, Hims, did I actually tell you about this? Hims, when they want to sell their Viagra state to state, they have to have a registered person. You can't like, yeah, you can't like ship medicine across state lines. But that, this is a totally different topic, but that law actually has been suspended currently. So doctors can prescribe. Yeah. That, and so that, that's an interesting opportunity. That loophole might be closed, but that just happened a few weeks ago. But I guess what I mean is if you're saying that they like are a registered agent in a certain state to practice a certain type of business, that's kind of interesting. You could do that for loads of different things, right?

And so I think what these guys are doing is cool. The reason I initially liked it was because the founder's name is Job, and I was like, what? Your name is Job and this is what you do? He's like, yeah. I was like, whoa, this is great. This is like, you know, a small little glint in my eyes when the fastest man on earth is named Usain Bolt. And I'm like, oh, Wow, that's, that's how the world is. It's amazing. The world is amazing.

Are you sure it's not Job?

It's spelled J-O-B, so it's Job to me. Um, and I was like, dude, your name is Job and you're about hiring people remotely? Like, this is fantastic.

And probably Job.

Well, he's from— I think he's Dutch. I think he's from the Netherlands. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Sorry, I talked to him before. I thought about investing in this company and I liked everything. I talked to the guy, liked it, liked the premise. He had a win under his belt from GitLab before this. He was like super early there, number 4 or something. And, uh, and then I didn't invest because I got busy.

You should have, you missed out. I'm looking at him now, he kind of looks like the terrorist from Air Force One, like the— like the— he looks like the Russian terrorist who wears like tracksuits.

All right, and moving on.

Or from— or no, from, uh, uh, uh, Die Hard with a Vengeance. He looks like one of those guys.

Yeah, dude, he's not soft. This guy's hard, dude. He's hard as a Russian terrorist, dude.

Google his name and look at his headshot. He looks— he looks like a terrorist in Call of Duty.

I can't even Google. I just Googled job remote. I got a bunch of job boards, uh, to work.

His name's Job van der Voort.

Yeah, that's right. Uh, all right, let me take it. I've talked to this guy on video chat.

Oh, he looks good.

He's a handsome guy. What are you talking about?

I'm not— I didn't say he's ugly. I just looked like he'll like he'll fucking kill you.

Yeah, he looks like he'll fuck you up, which I think you need to do international business like this.

So, okay. Yeah, no, I like this company. I'm not criticizing it. It's a compliment if you ask me. He just doesn't— he just looks like he's selling nuclear arms, not like, you know, recruiting services.

Okay. I got an idea for you. Um, this is a boring idea, so you're probably not going to like it, or maybe you'll like it. I don't know. Um, so right now, uh, one thing I'm learning, this is part of my export, uh, my import list from a big company, which is basically At a big company, one challenge is that you— like, headcount is like oil. And so you like kind of— you're— every division wants more headcount. The company raises money so that they can— or, or, you know, decides every year how much headcount they have. It's like a magic number. And, um, and so, you know, but then the problem is that, you know, that's like— it tells you, hey, you're going to hire 25 new heads this year. That's your department. That's what you've got. But the problem is some people leave, right? So you have attrition. But the problem is nobody knows how much attrition there's gonna be. And so I'm learning right now how big of a problem this is, which is there's like HR people who are trying to model in Excel and trying to go back through this stuff and try to figure out, okay, year over year, what's our percent attrition? How many, how many people leave the job? 15% a year. How many are gonna leave this quarter? And you need this to do financial planning so you know how much you're gonna spend. You also need it to figure out how much to hire because you don't just think about, okay, if we're gonna do this amount of work, we need to hire this many more people. You have to take into account that you're gonna also lose people, and nobody knows how much you're gonna lose. So I think there's something around attrition for big companies, which is either a, a much better modeling system, an automatic projection system, forecast system for attrition. It takes your historical data, it can take the job— other companies' jobs, uh, other company attrition— and tell you, hey, a lot of people are switching jobs right now. Or like for COVID, we predict that a lot of people are not going to switch jobs right now due to the uncertainty of the of the economy.

And like, how isn't— isn't that— aren't these— isn't this a thing? Isn't this what PeopleSoft did?

Uh, maybe. I don't know. I don't use PeopleSoft, but I know that like we use Workday and other things like that, and this doesn't come baked in for that, or at least we don't.

That's interesting. So like, if I wanted to get rich and I liked software, I absolutely would do something in that field.

There's something to this. Okay. And then there's one other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is, do you know who this guy Yisheng Wang is? Have you heard this name before?

Yeah. He was the CEO of Reddit.

Yeah, he's CEO of Reddit. Uh, in 2005 he was at Facebook, so he's very early at Facebook. Um, seems like a super smart guy, to be honest. And, uh, I've been reading his like blog for a while. I think this guy's smart, but I didn't know what he was doing. I just heard he's up to like a new company. And so I was like, all right, anytime there's somebody who I think is really, really interesting and they're doing something, I want to know what it is. And it's pretty ambitious. I wanted to talk about it. So he's literally trying to solve global warming by planting a bunch of trees. And, um, okay, so what does that mean, that you're really going to solve climate change? And so he has this blog post called A Massive Global Reforestation Project Is How We Fix Climate Change, and he walks through just sort of his logic one by one. And this reminds me of like—

I love this shit.

I remember reading— I remember reading Elon Musk's secret master plan that he published back before Tesla was famous, and I remember reading that and being like, wow, this is like really audacious. Who's this Elon Musk guy? Okay, he did this PayPal zip Zip2, you know, he did this other company. I should pay attention to this because this guy, this sounds pretty audacious. And, uh, you know, I can't disagree with the logic here. And that's how I felt when I was reading this. Now I think this is out of my depth scientifically, so I don't know if this is legit, but he's a legit guy, and so I respect that he's looking into this.

So is this a business?

It's a business.

So how does it make money?

Yeah, I'm reading about it. And August 17th, 2019, he launched this. Or he announced this. So if you Google Yi Shan Wong, so Y-I-S-H-A-N Wong, W-O-N-G, trees, and then just the word trees, you'll see two posts on Medium. Dude, this is fascinating as shit. This is awesome.

I don't know how this is badass.

And like, I don't know how it makes money, but it's cool.

Yeah. If he saves the world, fantastic. I don't know if it makes money or not, but, you know, he talks about like, okay, the cost of this solar project, you know, obviously this is a lot. It's like, I don't know, x, it's like a single-digit trillion. He's like, but the global GDP is this much, you know, could we dedicate 3% of the global GDP to solving climate change? I think we're going to need to. And, um, and amazing. So I think it's amazing, and I love that, like, you know, he didn't come out on TechCrunch. You know, you don't read about this on TechCrunch. The reason I found this was because a local Hawaiian newspaper was talking about, hey, this guy's trying to plant this forest over here on this little area. And I was like, that's legit that he's like actually doing the work. So like respect for actually going and doing the work and working on one of the biggest, hardest problems to solve. So that's why I like this guy.

How rich do you think this guy is? And do you think he's able to do this because he's rich? Or is he like, what do you think is going on here?

I would guess, you know, if you're at Facebook 2005, that's really—

I mean, he could be worth $100 million.

That's really early. Yeah. He could easily be worth $100 million. I don't know what his role was there exactly.

He worked as a senior engineer at PayPal from 2001 to 2005. Right.

He joined Facebook as a single-digit millions.

He joined Facebook as a senior director of eng— as the director of engineering in 2005.

So he, and that's at least tens of millions, I think, in the IPO.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, if you said he has $100 million in the bank, I would not be surprised.

Yeah. Um, so anyways, I think this is, this is badass and, uh, I don't know, pretty inspiring.

It's called Terracotta Nation. I think it is inspiring. And My takeaway from this is, um, yeah, the climate change, awesome. I'm not like crazy passionate about it, but I support it totally. I think it's neat. My big takeaway though is like the type of balls you have to have in order to have these ambitions and then to follow through with it. I find that to be the most inspiring.

Exactly. Um, there's also this meme I saw which was, and you know, great, I'm going to describe a meme on a podcast. It's hard to say, but like it's basically two scientists and they're looking at the coronavirus, two little humps, like one that's a, you know, we've all seen this diagram now of like one curve and then the flattened curve. And so they're looking at it and it's like the height of their shins and they're like, they're looking at that and then behind them is the climate change hump, which is like 10 times their height. And it's like, yeah, I hope we get through this. And it's like, because there's a much bigger problem coming. And I think, you know, I could have never imagined there's a world where, oh, all businesses shut down, everybody has to stay in their home. Like, I thought that's a nuclear bomb. Like, there's the only way that this is the case is like there's a nuclear bomb or like, I don't know, some crazy terrorist shit. And, you know, coronavirus did this to us in like a month. Um, you know, when, when we hit the tipping point for climate change, you know, who knows what the world is going to look like and what's going to happen. Um, it's pretty scary.

Uh, do you think that you're going to go work from the office again?

No, I actually told my company, I was like, I don't think I'll ever go commute to the office again.

Dude, that's interesting. Cause at the beginning of this you were like, dude, I hate remote. I hate this. I don't believe in this.

Yep. And my opinion changes. A humble and smart man can admit when he's changed and is wrong. So I am humble and smart.

All right. We got to end on that. That's great. You got anything else you want to shout out?

No, maybe we will have things to shout out soon. Uh, we're gonna be work— let's— we're gonna start— what I want to work on some projects like, uh, some private Q&As.

Okay, nice.

But all right, we'll shoot those out, shout those out later.

All right, sounds good. So yeah, thanks for listening.